LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



MY STUDY FIRE 

Second Series 



WORKS BY MR. MABIE. 



MY STUDY FIRE. 

MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series. 

UNDER THE TREES AND ELSE- 
WHERE. 

SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. 

ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRE- 
TATION. 




\ 






Flaubert. 



MY STUDY FIRE j4 by m 

HAMILTON WRIGHT^MABIE *l 
SECOND SERIES . . . 












ii^iry^^ 



NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
MDCCCXCV 



v. 



S 




N 






Copyright, 1894, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 

All rights reserved. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



TO 

LORRAINE 

AND 

HELEN 



CONTENTS. 



♦ 

Page 

The Book and the Reader i 

The Reader's Secret 6 

The Poetry of Flame 12 

The Finalities of Expression 17 

Enjoying One's Mind 23 

A Neglected Gift . 29 

Concerning Culture 34 

The Magic of Talk 39 

Work and Art 46 

Joy in Life 51 

The Real and the Sham 57 

Lightness of Touch 63 

The Poets' Corner * . . 68 

The Joy of the Moment 74 

The Lowell Letters 79 

The Tyranny of Books , 86 

The Spell of Style 91 

The Speech as Literature 96 



viii CONTENTS 

Page 

A Poet of Aspiration 101 

The Reading Public 107 

Sanity and Art 113 

Manner and Man 119 

The Outing of the Soul 123 

The Power which Liberates 128 

The Unconscious Artist 133 

The Law of Obedience 138 

Struggle in Art 143 

The Passion for Perfection 148 

Criticism as an Interpreter 153 

The Educational Quality of Criticism .... 158 

Plato's Dialogues as Literature , . 163 

The Power of the Novel 169 

Concerning Originality 173 

By the Way 178 



MY STUDY FIRE. 



THE BOOK AND THE READER. 

Mrs. Battle, intent upon whist, insisted upon "a 
clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." 
The veteran reader, who has come to love his occupa- 
tion not only for what it gives him but for itself, is 
equally punctilious; he must have a quiet room, a 
cheerful blaze, and the book that fits his mood. He 
has meditated before the fire, book in hand, so many 
silent and happy days that he knows all the subtle 
adjustments which a man may make between himself 
and his library. I rarely look at my books in that 
leisurely half-hour which precedes getting to work 
without fancying myself at the keyboard of an organ, 
the pipes of which are the gilded and many-coloured 
rows on the shelves about me. One may have any 
kind of music he chooses ; it is only a question of 
mood. There is no deep harmony, no haunting mel- 
ody, ever heard by the spirit of man which one may 
not hear if he knows his books thoroughly. The great 
gales that swept Ulysses into unknown seas, and the 
soft winds that stirred the myrtles and brought down 



2 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the pine cones about Theocritus are still astir, if one 
knows how to listen. And those inner melodies which 
the heart of man has been singing to itself these thou- 
sands of years are audible above all the tumult of the 
world if one has a place of silence, an hour of solitude, 
and a heart that has kept the freshness of its youth. 

The quality which makes a reader master of the 
secret of books is primarily of the soul, and only sec- 
ondarily of the mind ; and to get the deepest and 
sweetest out of literature one must read with the heart. 
A book read with the mind only is skimmed; true 
reading involves the imagination and the feelings. 
And it is for this reason that one needs to select a 
book for the day, instead of taking the first one that 
comes to hand. If one reads simply as a mental exer- 
cise or for information, one book is as good as another ; 
but if one reads for personal enlargement and enrich- 
ment, every hour has its own book. There are days 
for Sir Thomas Browne and days for Lamb — although 
I am often of opinion that all days are for Lamb ; 
there are days for Shakespeare and days for Words- 
worth, days for Scott and days for Thackeray. The 
great days when one is buoyant, fertile, virile, belong 
to the great writers. Emerson says, with regard to 
that difficult dialogue of Plato's, the " Timseus," that 
one must wait long for the fit hour in which to read it : 
" At last the elect morning arrives, the early dawn — a 
few lights conspicuous in the heavens, as of a world 
just created and still becoming — and in its wide 
leisure one dare open that book." These hours of 



THE BOOK AND THE READER. 3 

health and vitality belong to Dante, Shakespeare, and 
Goethe, and their kindred. The morning hours are 
due to the mountain summits, and it is a sad waste 
to bestow them on any outlook narrower than the 
horizons. But there are other days, hardly less profit- 
able, when one does not stir with the lark, but lingers 
under the shadow of the roof-tree ; and for these more 
subdued hours there are voices equally musical, if not 
so compelling, voices of personal if not of universal 
truth. A reader of catholic temper will welcome all 
the great spirits at his hearthstone, and will leave the 
latch-string out for the new-comer whose name still 
lingers in that delightful obscurity which precedes fame. 

T" It is a mistake to read too many books, to permits 

the habit of reading to obscure the ends of reading ; 

but it is equally a mistake to read exclusively in a very 

\ few directions. There are people whose egotism trans- 
forms their very faults into virtues, and who imagine that 
their love of books is profound because it is limited. " 
One can have but few intimate friends, but it is wise to 
choose these friends from among the greatest, and 
especially from among those whose temperament, 
habit, and surroundings are different from our own. 

Clt was said of Dr. Mulford that he was narrow on great 
lines j the difficulty with many men is that they are 
narrow on small lines. It is wise to follow one's taste, 
^- for that is the line of least resistance, but it must not 
be forgotten that what is commonly called taste is not 
necessarily good taste ; it is merely personal inclina- 
tion : good taste involves education. Our companions 



4 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of the mind ought, therefore, to be, not those who 
confirm us in our preconceptions and build our limita- 
tions still more massively about us, but those who lib- 
erate us from the defects of our nature and the faults 
of our training. " Our friends," says Emerson, " are 
those who make us do what we can." The friend who 
entertains us is welcome, but if he does not pass 
beyond that stage in our intercourse he never really 
touches what is deep and individual in us ; there is no 
real commerce of soul between us. The wise reader, 
therefore, will not always turn to^xme corner of his 
library, but will pass from shelf to shelf, and will know 
best those who are best worth knowing. 

Those only who can command the highest pleasures 
of life — solitude, leisure, and books — are able to 
realize the temptations which beset the reader and lure 
him often from the strait and narrow way which leads 
to the deepest and richest intellectual life. Sitting in 
slippered ease before a merry fire, the earth white to 
the horizon, the air keen as that at Elsinore, bells in 
the distance and silence and warmth within doors, one 
feels the danger of becoming a callous monopolist. 
The consciousness that one is steeping his mind in 
pure comfort, in unmixed delight, while most men are 
toiling in offices and rushing about crowded streets, 
sometimes breeds a dangerous sense of being favoured 
of fortune. The scholar has ever been the most fortu- 
nate of men, because he is free to pursue the things of 
the mind, while his fellows are compelled to pursue 
the things of the body. But the scholar is sometimes 



THE BOOK AND THE READER. 5 

as arid as some men of affairs, as juiceless and unin- 
teresting as some capitalists. Acquisition for its own 
sake develops the same quality of character whether 
one devotes himself to the hoarding of money or of 
facts. There is, however, a largeness, a vitality, about 
books which helps one against the very temptations 
which they present to the man who loves them. To 
read for the mere luxury of reading is to miss the best 
things which they have to give. In every true com- 
panionship there is an interchange ; one gives as well 
as receives. The best reading — the most intelligent 
and fruitful — involves a community of interest and 
thought between the reader and the writer; the con- 
tribution of the latter is positive, and that of the former 
negative, but both are real and both are necessary. 
The actor speaks in vain unless the imagination of the 
theatre kindles and co-operates with him. In every 
audience there are listeners who have almost as much 
to do with the speaker's felicity and eloquence as he 
has himself; they are persons who listen actively, not 
passively. There are readers who hang like dead 
weights on the skirts of a writer, and there are those 
who walk beside him buoyant with his strength, eager 
with his energy of spirit, and kindled with the glow of 
his thought. These are the readers who make a true 
exchange with the writer, who are not weakened by 
many books, who select the best, and become com- 
panions of the heart as well as of the mind. 



THE READER'S SECRET. 

One of the secrets of the artist is the facility and 
completeness with which he turns his conscious pro- 
cesses of mind into unconscious ones, and so does 
without effort that which costs a man less thoroughly 
trained no little toil. To do with ease what one began 
to do with effort is to have passed from the state of 
the artisan to that of the artist. Art involves the hard- 
est kind of work, but in its essence it is play ; for it is 
always an overflow of the creative force of a rich nature, 
and never power strained to the last point of endurance. 
A great picture, poem, or symphony always leaves the 
impression of something behind richer and profounder 
than that which it conveys ; it makes one conscious, 
as Ruskin has said, of a great power rather than of 
great effort. A man is never master of his material 
and his art until they have become so much a part of 
him that he can hardly separate himself from them. 
The material has been absorbed by his imagination 
and brooded over so long that it becomes his own by 
the only absolute right of possession known among 
men. So Shakespeare took the story of the " Tem- 
pest "as he found it in some Italian or Spanish tale, 
and meditated upon it until the whole wealth of his 



THE READER'S SECRET. 7 

nature passed into it and the bare framework became 
incrusted with such pearls as lie only in the great deeps 
of such a heart as his. The art has been so lovingly 
studied and so loyally practised that it becomes a 
skill of the soul rather than a dexterity of the hand, 
and what was at first calculated with nicest sense of 
proportion and adjustment becomes at last a natural and 
almost effortless putting forth of strength. 

Now, the trained reader who has mastered his art 
passes through a kindred progress from the conscious 
to the unconscious. He begins with rules, times, and 
habits ; these are the mechanical side of his training ; 
but when he has learned his craft he has long ago for- 
gotten them. The artist's education is of supreme 
importance to him ; but when he comes at last to 
handle his brush with creative freedom and force, the 
processes of his training are as far behind him and out 
of his thought as is the hard discipline of learning one's 
letters out of mind when one is deep in " Henry 
Esmond" or "The Tale of Two Cities." The con- 
scious process has become unconscious ; that which 
one began to do as work he now does as play. The 
attitude of the reader toward his book is at last one 
of unconscious receptivity ; his intelligence is keenly 
awake and active, but it has ceased to be conscious 
of itself; the whole nature is absorbed in the book./ 
This means true reading, — reading, not for entertain-" 
ment, but for personal enrichment and enlargement. 
One may skim a book as a swallow skims through the 
air and leaves no trace of its flight ; or one may build 



8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

a nest in a book and make it one of the homes of the 
spirit in the brief summer of life. The great works of 
the imagination ought to be part of our lives as they 
were once of the very substance of the men who made 
them. 

To see only the splendid pageantry of the Shake- 
spearean drama is to suffer the eye to cheat the imagi- 
nation. Shakespeare speaks to that which is deepest 
and most individual in us ; his word is for the soul, 
not for the ear only. To catch the matchless music 
of his verse is, indeed, one of the joys of life ; but that 
faultless melody, which drains into its harmonious flow 
all the rills of music hidden in spoken words, is but 
the sign and symbol of the life which it contains and 
reveals. When the young Goethe said, after reading 
Shakespeare for the first time, that he felt as if he had 
been reading the book of fate with the hurricane of 
life sweeping through it and tossing its leaves to and 
fro, he made it clear that he had read Shakespeare with 
his heart ; he had touched the vital power in the great 
dramatist, and he had been enriched for all time. 
Every great book is charged with life ; the measure 
of its greatness is the degree in which it has been vital- 
ised by the great nature out of which it issued. This 
vital power is the heart and soul of the book, and to 
get at it and possess it is the highest task and the su- 
preme reward of the reader of the book. When he 
has reached a point where, his intelligence alert and 
eager, he unconsciously absorbs the book, he has be- 
come co-operative with the writer, and, in a 



THE READER'S SECRET. Q 

a level with him. It is to such readers that the great 
minds speak, and from such readers they hold back 
nothing they have learned of the mystery of life and 
art. 

One may read the play of " Antony and Cleopatra " 
and get nothing from it but a series of brilliant pictures ; 
or one may read it and add a large measure of Eastern 
and Roman life to his own life, and push back the 
horizons of his own experience so as to include these 
great and tragical workings-out of human destiny under 
both eternal and historical conditions. Could a day 
of solitude and silence be given to a richer use than 
this ? One will not drain the play of its meaning in 
many days, but one day set apart to it will make the 
work of succeeding days easy and inevitable. Here 
is a great piece of art, which is, like all kindred works, 
a great piece of life. To get at its secret one must 
use all intelligence, but above all one must open his 
heart to it ; one must be willing, first of all, to receive 
it fully and unresistingly ; there will be time enough for 
criticism later ; the first thing to be done is to possess the 
poem. When one forgets himself and surrenders him- 
self to a work of art, he feels at the very start its obvious 
beauty ; he gets the first intention of the poet ; he aban- 
dons himself to the music with which the thought first 
speaks to him, to the colour and form which instantly ad- 
dress the eye. He who would master a noble piece of 
art must begin with the purest, fullest, and simplest joy 
in its most obvious beauty. 

This very beauty awakens the imagination, and now 



10 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the reader becomes a poet no less than the writer ; he 
confirms the true art of the play by disclosing in him- 
self the miracle which true art always works. For 
great art is never complete in itself; it is complete 
only in the imagination of him who really sees it, and 
when that imagination finishes the sublime work which 
the greatest poet can only begin. And now Rome 
and Egypt cease to be geographical expressions ; they 
rise on the horizon of thought; they are thronged 
with hurrying feet, and life surges through their streets 
and beats itself out against their walls. And that life 
takes on its own form and atmosphere : Rome, mas- 
sive, virile, masterful ; Egypt, languorous, voluptuous, 
enervating. Cities, dress, atmosphere, are recreated ; 
and, touched by the same spell, men and women whose 
names were fading on the dusty page of history live 
and move with a vitality which once made them 
masters of the world-movements. These striking 
persons reveal their several characters, disclose their 
relations to the time, the institutions, and the his- 
toric movement ; we are absorbed in their personal 
destiny as it is wrought out against the background of 
two civilisations. The story runs on with an ever- 
widening sweep and with ever-clearing tendency, and 
slowly, out of that which is personal and individual, 
the vaster drama of the soul unfolds itself, and what 
was Roman and Egyptian becomes universal and for 
all time. When at last the curtain falls, we have made 
conquest of a striking bit of history, of two diverse 
kinds of civilisation, of one of the most splendid and 



THE READER'S SECRET. II 

significant stories of human passion and suffering, 
and of a great chapter out of the spiritual story of the 
race. This appropriation has come to us, not by 
analysis, but by the co-operating activity of the imagi- 
nation, opening the mind and the heart to the free 
play of the poet's purpose and genius ; analysis may 
come later, but the vital quality and the spiritual secret 
of the play are mastered by unconscious receptivity. 
It is always better to give than to receive, and in giving 
ourselves we have gained Shakespeare. 



THE POETRY OF FLAME. 

One who has the passion for reading learns to read 
under all conditions ; but there are books which refuse 
to compromise with the convenience of the reader, 
and demand not only the right moment but the har- 
monious atmosphere. One may read Dickens with 
impunity anywhere ; the human interest in his stories 
is so close and so catholic that they gain rather than 
lose by the sense of the nearness and pressure of 
human life ; but it would be little less than sacrilege to 
open Landor's " Hellenics " in a street-car, or Sir 
Philip Sidney's " Arcadia " on a ferry-boat. Books of 
this temper will not bear contact with the hard actuali- 
ties of human condition ; they exact the reverence of 
a quiet mood and an hour of solitude. So, I some- 
times fancy, every book guards its innermost secret 
with certain conditions which, like the hedge of thorns 
about the sleeping Princess, preserve it for those 
elected by taste and temperament to master it. There 
are poems which need the high light of summer morn- 
ings out-of-doors; and there are poems which need 
the ruddy flame of the wood fire. All motion has a 
rhythm, if we are keen enough to detect it ; and I 
suspect that every dancing flame playing capriciously 



THE POETRY OF FLAME. 1 3 

along the glowing logs has a music of its own. Some- 
times, when one is in the mood, the rhythm of the fire 
strikes into the rhythm of the verse, and the two flow 
on together. Fortunate is the poet when Nature takes 
up his song in her own key, and fortunate is the reader 
when this special felicity befalls him ! 

An open fire finds its peculiar charm in the libera- 
tion of imagination which it effects. It is all colour, 
motion, sound, and change, and he must be dull 
indeed who does not straightway become a poet under 
its spell. For the work of the fire is a symbol of the 
work of the imagination; it liberates the ethereal 
qualities prisoned in the dense fibres of the wood ; it 
transforms the prose of hard material into the poetry 
of flame. Whether we respond to it or not, the hum 
of the fire is a song out of the music to which all 
things are set, and its brief burning is part of the 
process by which, to those who see with the imagina- 
tion, this hard, intractable world is always bearing that 
harvest of poetry of which Emerson was thinking when 
he wrote : " Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 
saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible 
world; knew that a tree has another use than for 
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of 
the earth than for tillage and roads ; that these things 
bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being 
emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their 
natural history a certain mute commentary on human 
life." 

The open fire sings its song, heard or unheard, in 



14 MY STUDY FIRE. 

all ears. It is the oldest and most primitive of all the 
forms of service which men exact from nature ; but, 
glowing on all hearths and for all sorts and conditions 
of men, it is always and everywhere transforming the 
prose of life into poetry ; for poetry, being the soul of 
things, is universal. It is only the very highest gifts 
which, as Lowell has said of heaven, are to be had for 
the asking. To a few are given the shows of rank and 
the luxury of wealth, but purity, nobility, and self- 
sacrifice are to be had by every comer. We are all 
born poets, although so many of us defeat the purposes 
of nature. For the world produces poetry as naturally 
and inevitably as a tree bears its blossoms, and we are 
compelled to close our eyes to avoid seeing that which 
the imagination must see if it see at all. It is in what 
we call common things that poetry hides, and he who 
cannot find it there cannot find it anywhere. It is 
absence of the poetic mind, not lack of poetic material, 
which makes some periods so sterile in imaginative 
production. When the imagination is powerful and 
creative, everything turns to poetry, — the stranded 
ship on the bar, the rusty anchor at the wharf, the 
glimpse of cloud at the end of the street, the shout of 
children at play, the crumbling hut, the work-stained 
man returning from his task, — the whole movement 
and stir of life in the vast range of common incident 
and universal experience. Touch life anywhere with 
the imagination and it turns into gold, or into some- 
thing less material and perishable. We live, move, and 
have our being in the atmosphere of poetry ; for every 



THE POETRY OF FLAME. 1 5 

act of sacrifice, every touch of tenderness, every word 
of love, every birth of aspiration, is so much experience 
transformed into poetry. Could anything be more 
commonplace, to the mind that has not learned that 
the commonplace is always an illusion, than the fact 
that a young girl, living in rural solitude, had died? 
That was the bare fact, the prose rendering ; and this 
is the truth, the poetic rendering : — 

" She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
Beside the springs of Dove ; 
A maid whom there were none to praise, 
And very few to love. 

" A violet by a mossy stone 

Half hidden from the eye ! — 
Fair as a star, when only one 
Is shining in the sky. 

" She lived unknown, and few could know 
When Lucy ceased to be ; 
But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
The difference to me ! " 

There is a kind of elemental simplicity of feeling, 
imagery, and diction in these brief lines that touches 
us like the ripple of a brook in the woods. Life has 
few facts more unadorned than those which furnish the 
material for these verses, but does the imagination 
flash its mysterious light anywhere in literature more 
distinctly? The little poem is as quiet, simple, solitary 
as the mountain tarn, but it is as deep ; and there are 
stars in its depths. It is an illusion that some things are 



1 6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

commonplace, some experiences without significance, 
and some lives without vision and beauty. The wood 
becomes flame, the seed turns into flower, the mist 
athwart the rays of light is changed into the gold of the 
evening sky, the hidden and unconscious sacrifice 
flashes suddenly into one of those deeds which men 
count for proofs of immortality, the uncouth pleader of 
the frontier becomes the hero of the " Commemora- 
tion Ode," — 

" New birth of our new soil, the first American." 



THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION. 

Socrates seems to most of us an eminently whole- 
some character, incapable of corrupting the youth, 
although adjudged guilty of that grave offence, and 
altogether a man to be trusted and honoured. And 
the tradition of Xantippe adds our sympathy to our 
faith. But Carlyle evidently distrusted Socrates, for 
he says of him, reproachfully, that he was " terribly at 
ease in Zion." It is quite certain that neither within 
Zion nor outside its walls was Carlyle at ease. No 
sweating smith ever groaned more at his task than 
did this greatest of modern English literary artists. 
He fairly grovelled in toil, bemoaning himself and 
smiting his fellow-man in sheer anguish of spirit ; pro- 
ducing his masterpieces to an accompaniment of pas- 
sionate but unprofane curses on the conditions under 
which, and the task upon which, he worked. This, 
however, was the artisan, not the artist, side of the 
great writer ; it was the toil-worn, unrelenting Scotch 
conscience astride his art and riding it at times as 
Tam o' Shanter spurred his gray mare, Meg, on the 
ride to Kirk Alloway. Socrates, on the other hand, 
is always at ease and in repose. His touch on the 
highest themes is strong and sure, but light almost as 



1 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

air. There seem to be no effort about his morality, 
no self-consciousness in his piety, no strain in his phi- 
losophy. The man and his words are in perfect har- 
mony, and both seem to be a natural flowering and 
fulfilment of the higher possibilities of life. Uncouth 
as he was in person, there was a strange and com- 
pelling beauty in this unconventional teacher ; for the 
expression both of his character and of his thought was 
wholly in the field of art. He was an artist just as 
truly as Phidias or Pericles or Plato ; one, that is, who 
gave the world not the processes but the results of 
labour; for grace, as George Macdonald somewhere 
says, is the result of forgotten toil. Socrates had his 
struggles, but what the world saw and heard was the 
final and harmonious achievement; it heard the fin- 
ished speech, not the orator declaiming on the beach 
with pebbles in his mouth ; it saw the completed picture, 
not the artist struggling with those obdurate patches 
of colour about which Hamerton tells us. When 
the supreme moment and experience came, Socrates 
was calm amid his weeping friends, and died with the 
quiet assurance of one to whom death was so entirely 
incidental that any special agitation would seem to exag- 
gerate its importance ; and exaggeration is intolerable 
in art. 

This bit of vital illustration may suggest a deeper 
view of art than that which we habitually take, and a 
view which may make us for a moment conscious 
of the loss which modern life sustains in having lost 
so largely the art spirit. Men degenerate without a 



THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION. 1 9 

strong grasp on morality, but they grow deformed and 
unhappy without art. For art is as truly the final ex- 
pression of perfect character as of perfect thought, 
and beauty is as much a quality of divinity as right- 
eousness. When goodness gets beyond self-conscious- 
ness, when the love of man for God becomes as genu- 
ine and simple and instinctive as the love of a child 
for its father, both goodness and love become beauti- 
ful. Beauty is the final form of all pure activities, and 
truth and righteousness do not reach their perfect 
stage until they take on beauty. Struggle is heroic, 
and our imaginations are deeply moved by it, but 
struggle is only a means to an end, and to rest in it 
and glorify it is to exalt the process above the consum- 
mation. We need beauty just as truly as we need 
truth, for it is as much a part of our lives. A beauti- 
ful character, like a beautiful poem or statue, becomes 
a type or standard ; it brings the ideal within our 
vision, and, while it fills us with a divine discontent, 
satisfies and consoles us. The finalities of character 
and of art restore our vision of the ends of life, and, 
by disclosing the surpassing and thrilling beauty of the 
final achievement, reconcile us to the toil and anguish 
which go before it. The men and women are few 
who would not gladly die if they might do one worthy 
thing perfectly. 

The conscience of most English-speaking people 
has been trained in the direction of morality, but not 
in the direction of beauty. We hold ourselves with 
painful solicitude from all contact with that which cor- 



20 MY STUDY FIRE. 

rupts or defiles, but we are absolutely unscrupulous 
when it comes to colour and form and proportion. We 
are studious not to offend the moral sense, but we 
do not hesitate to abuse the aesthetic sense. We fret 
at political corruption, and at long intervals we give 
ourselves the trouble of getting rid of it ; but we put 
up public buildings which may well make higher intel- 
ligences than ours shudder at such an uncovering of 
our deformity. We insist on decent compliance with 
the law, but we ruthlessly despoil a beautiful landscape 
and stain a fair sky, as if these acts were not flagrant 
violations of the order of the universe. The truth is, 
our consciences are like our tastes ; they are only 
half trained. They operate directly and powerfully 
on one side of our lives, and on the other they are 
dumb and inactive. 

An intelligent conscience insists on a whole life no 
less than on a clean one ; it exacts obedience, not to 
one set of laws, but to law ; it makes us as uncomfort- 
able in the presence of a neglected opportunity as in 
the presence of a misused one. It is not surprising 
that men are restless under present conditions ; there 
is a squalor in many manufacturing and mining coun- 
tries which eats into the soul, — an ugliness that hurts 
the eye and makes the heart ache. Blue sky and green 
grass cry out at such profanation, and it is not strange 
that the soul of the man who daily faces that hideous 
deformity of God's fair world grows savage and that he 
becomes a lawbreaker like his employer. For lawbreak- 
ing is contagious, and he who violates the wholesome 



THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION. 21 

beauty of the world lets loose a spirit which will not 
discriminate between general and particular property, 
between the landscape and the private estates which 
compose it. The culprit who defaces a picture in a pub- 
lic gallery meets with condign punishment, but the man 
who defaces a lovely bit of nature, a living picture set in 
the frame of a golden day, goes unwhipped of justice ; 
for we are as yet only partly educated, and civilization 
ends abruptly in more than one direction. 

The absence of the corrective spirit of art is seen 
in the obtrusiveness of much of our morality and re- 
ligion ; we formulate and methodise so much that 
ought to be spontaneous and free. The natural key 
is never out of harmony with the purest strains of 
which the soul is capable, but we distrust it to such 
an extent that much of the expression of religious life 
is in an unnatural key. We are afraid of simple good- 
ness, and are never satisfied until we have cramped it 
into some conventional form and substituted for the 
pure inspiration a well-contrived system of mechanism ; 
for the Psalms we are always substituting the Cate- 
chism, and in all possible ways translating the deep 
and beautiful poetry of the spiritual life into the hard 
prose of ecclesiasticism and dogmatism. The perfect 
harmony of the life and truth of the divinest character 
known to men teaches a lesson which we have yet to 
learn. If the words of Christ and those of any cate- 
chism are set in contrast, the difference between the 
crudity of provisional statements and the divine per- 
fection of the finalities of truth and life is at once 



22 MY STUDY FIRE. 

apparent. We have learned in part the lesson of 
morality, but we have yet to learn the lesson of beauty. 
We have not learned it because in our moral education 
we have stopped short of perfection ; for the purest 
and highest morality becomes a noble form of art. 



ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 

Who that lives in this busy, noisy age has not envied 
the lot of Gilbert White, watching with keen, quiet 
eyes the little world of Selborne for more than fifty 
uneventful years ? To a mind so tranquil and a spirit 
so serene the comings and goings of the old domesti- 
cated turtle in the garden were more important than 
the debates in Parliament. The pulse of the world 
beat slowly in the secluded hamlet, and the roar of 
change and revolution beyond the Channel were only 
faintly echoed across the peaceful hills. The methodi- 
cal observer had as much leisure as Nature herself, and 
could wait patiently on the moods of the seasons for 
those confidences which he always invited, but which 
he never forced; and there grew up a somewhat 
platonic but very loyal friendship between him and the 
beautiful rural world about him. How many days of 
happy observation were his, and with what a sense of 
leisure his discoveries were set down, in English as 
devoid of artifice or strain or the fever of haste as the 
calm movements of the seasons registered there ! 
There was room for enjoyment in a life so quietly 
ordered ; time for meditation and for getting acquainted 
with one's self. 



24 MY STUDY FIRE. 

Most of us use our minds as tools, which are never 
employed save in our working hours ; we press them 
constantly to the limits of endurance, and often 
beyond. Instead of cultivating intimate friendship 
with them, we enslave them, and set them to tasks 
which blight their freshness and deplete their vitality. 
A mind cannot be always hard at work earning money 
for a man, and at the same time play the part of friend 
to him. Treated with respect and courtesy, there is 
no better servant than the mind; when this natural 
and loyal service is turned into drudgery, however, the 
servant makes no complaint and attempts no evasion, 
but the man loses one of the greatest and sweetest of 
all the resources of life. For there is no better fortune 
than to be on good terms with one's mind, and to live 
with it in unrestrained good-fellowship. We cannot 
escape living with it ; even death is powerless to sepa- 
rate us ; but, so far as pleasure is concerned, every- 
thing depends on the nature of the relation. The 
mind is ready to accept any degree of intimacy, but it 
is powerless to determine what that degree shall be ; it 
must do as it is bid, and is made a friend or a slave 
without any opportunity of choice. 

To enjoy one's mind one must take time to become 
acquainted with it. Our deepest friendships are not 
affairs of the moment ; they ripen slowly on the sunny 
side of the wall, and a good many seasons go to their 
perfect mellowness and sweetness. The man who 
wishes to get delight out of his mind, and be enter- 
tained by it, must give it time. The mind needs 



ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 25 

freedom and leisure, and cannot be its best without 
them. A good talker, who has a strain of imagination 
and sentiment in him, cannot be pushed into brilliant 
or persuasive fluency. If you are hurried and can 
give only partial attention, he is silent : the atmos- 
phere does not warm his gift into life. The mind is 
even more sensitive to your mood and dependent on 
your attitude. If you are so absorbed in affairs that 
you can never give it anything better than your cast- 
off hours, do not expect gay companionship from it ; 
for gayety involves a margin of vitality, an overflow of 
spirits. It is oftener on good terms with youth than 
with maturity, because young men drive it less and 
live with it more. They give it room for variety of 
interests and time for recreation, and it rewards them 
with charming vivacity. It craves leisure and ease of 
mood because these furnish the conditions under 
which it can become confidential; give it a summer 
day, and, if you have made it your friend, it will give 
you long hours of varied and wholesome entertain- 
ment. It has sentiment, imagination, wit, and mem- 
ory at its command, and, like an Eastern magician, 
will transport you to any climate or bring any object to 
your feet. Never was there so willing a friend, nor 
one whose resources are so constantly ignored. 

What a man finds in his mind and gets out of it 
depends very much on himself; for the mind fits its 
entertainment to the taste of its one tyrannical auditor. 
Probably few men have ever lived more loyally with 
their minds than Wordsworth. Fame found him a 



26 MY STUDY FIRE. 

recluse and left him solitary ; crowds had no charms 
for him, and at dinner-tables he had no gifts. He 
was at his best pacing his garden walk and carrying on 
that long colloquy with his mind which was his one 
consuming passion. The critics speak of him as an 
isolated, often as a cold, nature ; but no man of his 
time, not even Byron, put more passion into his work : 
only his passion was not for persons, it was for ideas. 
He had great moments with his mind, for he was 
repaid for the intensity of his surrender of other occu- 
pations and interests by thrilling inspirations, — those 
sudden liftings of the man into the clearness and 
splendour of vision which the mind commands in its 
highest moods. He who has felt that exaltation knows 
not only what must have come often to Wordsworth 
when the hills shone round him with a light beyond 
that of the sun, but has touched the very highest bound 
of human experience. A mind enriched by long con- 
tact with the best in thought and life, and cherished 
by loving regard for its needs, often repays in a single 
hour the devotion of a lifetime. Sometimes, beside 
the lamp at evening, the book closes in the hand 
because the mind swiftly flies from it to some distant 
and splendid outlook; or, on the solitary walk, the 
man stands still with beating heart because the mind 
has suddenly disclosed another and diviner landscape 
about him. 

Wordsworth found imagination and sentiment in 
his mind, as did the beautiful singer upon whom the 
laurel next descended; but Charles Lamb had the 



ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 2*] 

delights of wit. No men are on better terms with 
their minds than men of wit; one of the pleasures 
which they give their fellows of slower movement is 
the enjoyment which comes to them from their own 
unexpectedness. Most of us know what we shall 
think and say next ; or, if we do not know, we have no 
reason to anticipate either surprise or satisfaction from 
that part of the future which is to take its colour from 
our thoughts and words. A witty man, on the other 
hand, never knows what his mind will give him next; 
it is the unexpected which always happens in his men- 
tal history. Watch him as he talks, and note his 
delight in the tricks which his mind is playing upon 
him. He is as much in the dark as his auditors, and 
has as little inkling of the turn the talk will take next. 
His real antagonist is not the man who sends the ball 
back to him, but his own mind, which he is humour- 
ously prodding, and which is giving sharp thrusts in 
response. Charles Lamb found as much delight in his 
own quaintness as did any of his friends, and was as 
much surprised by those inimitable puns which stut- 
tered themselves into speech as if they were being 
translated out of some wittier language than ours. It 
is pleasant to think of the suppressed fun that went on 
within him on the high seat at the India House. And 
Sydney Smith was another beneficiary of his own mind, 
whose way through life was so constantly enlivened by 
the gayest companionship that even the drowsy 
English pulpit of his time had little power to subdue 
his spirits or dull the edge of his wit. Who that has 



28 MY STUDY FIRE, 

talked with Dr. Holmes has not witnessed that charm- 
ing catastrophe which befalls a man when his mind 
runs away with him and dashes into all manner of 
delightful but unsuspected roads, to bring back the 
listener at last with a keen consciousness that there is a 
good deal of undiscovered country about him, and that 
he was a dull fellow not to have known it before. The 
trouble is that he can never get himself run away with 
in like fashion ! And yet most of us would be more 
inspiring, more entertaining, and much wittier if we 
gave ourselves a chance to get on terms of intimacy 
with our own minds. Old Dyer had found, three 
centuries ago, the delights of this fellowship when he 
sang : — 

" My mind to me a kingdom is : 

Such present joys therein I find, 
That it excels all other bliss 

That earth affords or grows by kind ; 
Though much I want which most would have, 
Yet still my mind forbids to crave." 



A NEGLECTED GIFT. 

Sydney Smith undoubtedly said aloud what a great 
many people were saying in an undertone when he 
called Macaulay " an instrument of social oppression." 
The brilliant historian and essayist had notable gifts, 
and has done much for the solace and entertainment 
of mankind ; but his memory must have had an appall- 
ing aspect for those who sat near him at a dinner- 
table. It was relentlessly accurate, and the boundaries 
of it seemed to fade out in an infinity of miscellaneous 
information. The man who knew his Popes so well 
that he could repeat them backward, stood in sore 
need of the grace of forgetfulness to save him from 
becoming a scourge to his kind. The glittering eye of 
the Ancient Mariner did not hold the wedding guest 
more mercilessly to his gruesome narrative than does a 
tyrannical memory bind the weary listener to the re- 
cital of things it cannot forget. Burton analysed Mel- 
ancholy with great subtlety and particularity, but one 
wonders whether Burton's companionship would not 
have induced in another the very thing of which he 
tried to rid himself. Mr. Caxton was a dangerous per- 
son in his talking moods,' as Pisistratus discovered at 
an early age, and needed to be diverted from themes 



30 MY STUDY FIRE. 

which unlocked the stores of his knowledge. For 
some men hold their information in great masses like 
the snow on the high Alps, and an unwary step will 
often bring down an avalanche. Knowledge is of great 
moment and of lasting interest, but, like money, it 
must be used with tact and skill. A good library has a 
solid foundation of books of reference ; but they are 
subordinate to a superstructure of art, grace, vitality, 
and truth. 

If one had to choose between Macaulay, who never 
forgot anything, and Emerson, who rarely remembered 
anything in an exact, literal way, one would fasten 
upon the man of insight, and let the man of memory 
go his own way. In these days the art of memorizing 
has had great attention, but the art of forgetting has 
no professed masters or teachers. It is, nevertheless, 
one of the most important and charming of the arts ; 
the art of arts, indeed. For the skill of the artist is in 
his ability to forget the non-essentials and to remember 
the essentials. The faculty of forgetting gives the 
mind a true perspective, and shows past events in their 
just proportions and right relations. The archaeolog- 
ical painter forgets nothing, and his picture leaves us 
cold ; the poetic painter forgets everything, save the 
two or three significant things, and his picture sets our 
imagination aflame. There is entertainment in old 
Burton, because the man sometimes gets the better of 
his memory ; there is inspiration in Emerson, because 
the man speaks habitually as if all things were new- 
created, and there were nothing to remember. The 



A NEGLECTED GIFT. 3 1 

past is a delightful friend if one can live without it, but 
to the man who lives in it there is no greater tyrant. 

As the world grows older, the power to forget must 
grow with it, or mankind will bend, like Atlas, under a 
weight which will put movement out of the question. 
That only which illumines, enlarges, or cheers men 
ought to be remembered ; everything else ought to be 
forgotten. The rose in bloom has no need of the 
calyx whose thorny shielding it has outgrown. When 
the recollection of the past stimulates and inspires, it 
has immense value ; when its splendours make us con- 
tent to rest on ancestral achievements, it is a sore hin- 
drance. Filial piety holds the names of the fathers 
sacred ; but we are living our lives, not theirs, and it is 
far more important that we should do brave and just 
deeds than that we should remember that others have 
done them. The burning of the Alexandrian Library 
was not without its compensations, and the rate at 
which books are now multiplied may some day compel 
such burnings at stated intervals, for the protection of 
an oppressed race. The books of power are always 
few and precious, and long life is decreed for them by 
reason of the very vitality which gives them their place ; 
but the books of information must be subjected to a 
principle of selection, more and more rigorously applied 
as the years go by. Our posterity must conscientiously 
forget most of the books we have written. 

For the characteristic of art — the thing that sur- 
vives — is not memory, but insight. Our chief concern 
is to know ourselves, not our forbears ; and to master 



32 MY STUDY FIRE. 

this modern world, not the world of Caesar or that of 
Columbus. The great writer speaks out of a personal 
contact with life, and while he may enrich his report 
by apt and constant reference to the things that have 
been, his authority rests on his own clarity of vision 
and directness of insight. " Our age," says Emerson, 
"is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the 
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. 
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face 
to face ; we, through their eyes. Why should not we 
also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why 
should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight 
and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and 
not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season 
in nature, whose floods of life stream around and 
through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, 
to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope 
among the dry bones of the past, or put the living gen- 
eration into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? 
The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and 
flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new 
thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws 
and worship." 

Progress is largely conditioned on the ability to for- 
get the views and conclusions which have become au- 
thoritative. It took nearly a century of adventurous 
sailing and perilous adventure to persuade Europe that 
there was an undiscovered continent between India 
and its own shores, — so possessed was the European 
mind by the consistent blunders of the past about 



A NEGLECTED GIFT. 33 

this Western hemisphere. In the history of art, what 
are called the classical epochs — the periods of pre- 
cision, accuracy, and conventional restraint — are in- 
spired by memory; but the creative moments are 
moments of forgetfulness. The Renaissance was a 
moment of rediscovery, not of memory ; the literary 
movement of this century involved a determined for- 
getting of the standards and methods of the last cen- 
tury. The age that lives in its memory of other times 
and men is always timid and imitative ; the age that 
trusts its own insight is always audacious and creative. 
If we are to be ourselves, we must forget a good deal 
more than we remember. 

There is a real grace of character in forgetting the 
things that disturb the harmony of life. A keen re- 
membrance of injustice or suffering breeds cynicism; 
the power to forget that we have been wronged, or that 
life has pressed heavily upon us, develops sweetness, 
ripeness, and harmonious strength. On the threshold 
of any future life, one must pass through a great wave 
of forgetfulness ; it were better for us all if heaven 
were nearer to us by reason of the swift oblivion to 
which we consigned the wrongs we suffer in this brief 
burning of the candle of life. 



CONCERNING CULTURE. 

There are certain books which are touchstones of 
personal culture and taste, — books like Amiel's " Jour- 
nal," Arnold's " Culture and Anarchy," Landor's " Hel- 
lenics," and Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," which 
involve a certain preparation of the mind for their recep- 
tion and appreciation. For these books, and all books 
of their peculiar quality, contain an element of culture 
as well as of native gift ; and a certain degree of cul- 
ture must precede their appropriation by the reader. 
It used to be said that the odes of Horace were the 
special solace of gentlemen, — of men of a certain 
social training, which brought them into sympathetic 
contact with the worldly minded but charmingly trained 
poet of the Mantuan farm. There is a flavour as of 
old wine in many of the Horatian odes, and its deli- 
cacy is discerned only by the trained palate. In like 
manner the work of certain modern writers possesses 
a peculiar quality, impossible to define but readily 
detected, which finds its full recognition by, and dis- 
closes its entire charm to, minds which have had 
contact with the best in thought and life. 

There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, when 
what is technically called culture was taken up by the 



Matthew Arnold. 



CONCERNING CULTURE. 35 

intellectually curious and the socially idle, and made 
a fad ; and, like all other fads, it became, for the time 
being, a thing abhorred of all serious-minded and 
sincere people. For a fad is always a sham, and a 
sham in the world of art or of literature is peculiarly 
offensive and repugnant ; it is the perversion, some- 
times in the grossest form, of something essentially 
sound and noble. The ideal which took violent pos- 
session of so many people two decades ago was de- 
fective in that quality which is the very substance of 
genuine culture, the quality of ripeness. True culture 
involves a maturing of taste, intellect, and nature which 
comes only with time, tranquillity, and reposeful asso- 
ciations of the best sort. The more one really cares 
for it, the less he professes it ; the more one comes 
into possession of it, the less conscious does his pur- 
suit of it become. It marks an advanced stage of a 
general maturing and ripening, and it discloses its 
presence in fulness of knowledge, easy command of 
resources, maturity and sureness of taste, and that 
sense of power which conveys the impression of a 
large and spontaneous force playing through a rich 
nature. 

It is a mistake to suppose that this ripening of the 
man depends on a large acquaintance with books, 
although in these days, in most cases, books are indis- 
pensable aids. The Attic Greeks, the most genuinely 
cultivated people whom the world has yet known, had 
very slight contact with books; but they had the 
faculty, due largely to the strain of poetry and hence 



36 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of imagination in their education, of getting the soul 
out of life. They discerned and appropriated, by a 
training which had become instinctive, the best in life. 
They chose the beautiful as readily and constantly as 
we choose the inharmonious and the ugly ; they built 
in harmony with the laws of art as uniformly as we 
build in violation of those laws. Their Parthenon 
was as easy of accomplishment to them as the post- 
offices of Boston, New York, and Chicago were to us. 
They did not build better than they knew ; they built 
because they knew, and their knowledge was due to 
their culture. That culture was based on life, not on 
art, and hence their art had the compelling note of 
an original utterance, and not the faint music of an 
echo. 

Shakespeare was a typical man of culture, whose 
knowledge of a few books is beyond question, but 
whose knowledge of many books is more than doubt- 
ful. Oxford might have enriched him, as it did his 
great contemporary Spenser, but he enriched himself 
under circumstances apparently the most adverse. 
There is no rawness in his thought, nor in his art ; his 
insight is not surer than his touch upon language. In 
every play there is the richness of substance, the ful- 
ness of thought, the easy hand upon all the keys of 
speech, which betray the affluent nature, ripened be- 
yond strength into sweetness. Shakespeare was riper, 
in some ways, than Goethe, whose whole life was 
rigidly subordinated to the laws of growth. 

This quality of ripeness, shared by Tennyson, Lowell, 



CONCERNING CULTURE. 7)7 

Amiel, Arnold, is sometimes lacking in writers of great 
force and originality, and its absence always involves 
a certain impoverishment. If there is no obvious 
crudity, there is a certain thinness of tone, a rigidity 
of manner, a hardness of spirit. The ease, the grace, 
the charming unconsciousness, are absent ; one is con- 
tinually aware of limitations, instead of being cheered 
and buoyed up by a sense of unexhausted power. 
Lowell gives his readers no greater delight than the 
impression, conveyed by every page of his writing, 
that he has not said half he has in mind. The land- 
scape of thought, imagination, and knowledge through 
which he takes one, with a gait so easy and a humour 
so contagious, is full of variety and loveliness, but you 
are continually teased by vistas which hint at outlooks 
still more beautiful. What grace of bearing, modu- 
lation of tone, charm of manner, entire self-possession ! 
Here is no gifted and virile provincial who has broken 
away from hard conditions without rising above them, 
but a true man of the world of letters. This Olympian 
ease, which is the mark of the artist, is never the pos- 
session of the Titan, however strong. 

It is culture which conveys this impression and con- 
fers this charm, and culture does not come by nature ; 
it does not come by work even, for strenuousness is 
the very thing it rids a man of; it comes of lying fal- 
low and letting knowledge take possession of us. It 
is possible to know a great deal and be wholly without 
culture ; some scholars are as free from all trace of it 
as some well-conditioned men are of the charm of 



38 MY STUDY FIRE. 

good-manners. Culture is knowledge become part of 
the soil of a man's life ; it is not knowledge piled up 
like so many pieces of wood. It is knowledge ab- 
sorbed and transmuted by meditation into character. 
And this process involves leisure, solitude, the ability 
to keep one's hands and eyes idle at times. To get 
out of the current without losing its momentum is the 
problem of the man who wishes to be ripe as well as 
active. To possess one's mind, one must command a 
certain solitude and quiet ; for there is deep truth in 
Goethe's saying that while character is formed in the 
stream of the world, talent is formed in quietness. 
That ripeness of nature which Americans are quick to 
notice in the best English writers, scholars, and think- 
ers is the result of a rich meditative strain running 
through lives of steadfast but unhasting industry. A 
bit of knowledge cannot enrich a man until he has 
brooded over it in the solitude of quiet hours. An 
Oxford man once said that the perfection of the lawns 
in the college gardens was only a matter of three or 
four centuries of rolling and cutting ; and the faces of 
some famous university writers and thinkers betray the 
long years rich, not only in study, but in meditation, — 
that quiet brooding over knowledge and experience 
which drains them of their significance and power for 
the lasting enrichment of our own natures. 



THE MAGIC OF TALK. 

Those who have the privilege of hearing really good 
talk know that it is the most delightful of all the re- 
sources which the fortunate man commands. A gen- 
uine talk, free, spontaneous, sincere, and full of 
intelligence, is always a thing to be remembered. It 
is a delight to the mind so keen as to be almost sen- 
suous ; but it is a joy which effects a certain liberation 
in those who share it. A talk is often the starting- 
point in a brilliant or commanding career. Everybody 
recalls Hazlitt's account of his earliest hours with 
Coleridge, and how the magic of that rare mind 
wrought upon him until it seemed as if he had 
broken into a new world. The originative impulse 
which makes a man conscious of his power and con- 
fident in it sometimes comes from a book, but oftener 
from a talk. For a talk has the great advantage over 
a book of bringing the whole man into play. There is 
a flow of individual force, a free outgoing of personal 
energy, in talk, which give not only the full weight of 
the thought, but the entire impetus of the man ; and 
to listen to a rare man in full and free talk is not only 
to get the measure of his mind, but to feel the charm 



40 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of his temperament; and temperament is half of 
genius. 

There is an impression that writers put' their best 
thought into books ; but those who know the makers 
of books care, as a rule, more for the men than for the 
work they have done. There are, it is true, a few men 
from whom the gift of familiar and telling speech is 
withheld, and whose thought flows freely only from 
the point of the pen. Such men are so rare, however, 
that they confirm the almost universal possession of 
the genius for talk by men who hold genius in any 
other form. _ As a rule, the talk of men of letters is 
superior to their writing, and possesses a charm which 
their work fails to convey. A man of real strength is 
always greater than any specific putting forth of that 
strength ; and the moments which make us aware of 
the general force give us also the adequate expression 
of the man's range and talent. Most men of rich and 
trained personality fail of complete expression in any 
formal way, and it is a common feeling among the 
friends of men whose writing attracts wide attention 
that it does not completely express the man. There 
was something in the force and directness of Ten- 
nyson's talk which did not make itself felt in his 
melodious verse ; and, in spite of the poet's noble 
achievement, it is easy to understand the feeling of 
Fitzgerald that the Laureate never put his whole power 
forth. This was notably true of Lowell, whose opu- 
lence of intellectual resource and whose peculiarly rich 
and attractive personality gave his work, to many who 



THE MAGIC OF TALK. 4 1 

knew the man, the air of brilliant improvisation rather 
than the final and masterful utterance of his affluent 
nature. Doubtless the friends of Shakespeare, the 
greatest of all improvisers, and apparently the most 
indifferent to the fate of his work, had a kindred feel- 
ing concerning the plays and poems of one whom his 
friends and earliest editors called " so worthy a friend 
and fellow," " whose wit can no more lie hid than it 
could be lost." 

We shall never know what we have lost by the 
absence of a Boswell from the Mermaid Tavern on 
those evenings when Shakespeare, in those last rich 
years of his life, came up from Stratford and found in 
the fellowship of his old friends that solvent which gave 
his wit, his imagination, and his insight the liberation 
of a genial hour and company. Shakespeare's Boswell 
would probably have written the most deeply interest- 
ing book in all literature, — a pre-eminence of which 
Boswell's matchless account of Johnson comes within 
measurable distance. Johnson is, indeed, the fore- 
most illustration of the general truth that men of 
letters are greater than their works. The author of 
" Rasselas " is very indifferently read in these days, 
but the great talker at the Literary Club and in the 
library at Streatham is probably the best-known figure 
of the last century. The writer was solemnly eloquent 
in that sonorous Latin style of his ; but the talker had 
a force and freshness which took by instinct to the 
sturdy Saxon side of the language. Great writing is 
never artificial, — a mode of speech which differs from 



42 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the vernacular as a carefully planned lawn differs from 
the opulent carelessness of nature, — it is, rather, the 
inevitable form of expression to which a thought must 
ultimately come when it sinks into the consciousness 
of a race and become part of its deepest life. The 
supreme charm of talk lies in its unforced freshness 
and power ; in the fact that the impulse takes a man 
unaware, and what is deepest and truest in him finds 
its way into speech. 

The community of feeling which talk brings about 
sets the most sluggish fancy free, and solicits frankness 
from the most reticent. The greatest minds are not 
independent of their fellows; on the contrary, the 
measure of their greatness is accurately recorded in 
the extent of their obligations to others. A lyric poet 
may strike a few clear notes, as musical and as solitary 
as those of the hermit thrush hidden in the woods ; 
but the rich, full music of the great dramatic poet 
draws its deep and victorious sweetness from the 
universal human experience, whose meaning it con- 
veys and preserves. \j The touch of hand upon hand is 
not so real as the touch of mind upon mind ; and as 
the contact of the hands gives a sense of sympathy 
and fellowship, so does the contact of mind give a 
sense of kinship of thought. To be alone is to be 
silent ; to be with others is to express that which 
silence has brought us. Companionship of the right 
kind not only draws our hidden thought from its 
seclusion, but invites new thoughts to give it welcome 
and keep it company. The first half* hour may find 



THE MAGIC OF TALK. 43 

the circle about the fire still somewhat constrained and 
slow of tongue ; for we people of English speech do 
not give ourselves freely to others ; but the second 
half-hour sees everybody intent and alert. There is a 
contagious quality in the air, and every man craves his 
moment of speech. When talk gets down to the solid 
ground of entire truth and sincerity in those who share 
it, a capitalisation of knowledge is speedily and in- 
formally effected. There lies in each mind a piece of 
information, and in every memory a bit of experience, 
which are freely contributed to the general fund. 

The thought-product or result is, however, but a 
small part of the total outcome of a genuine talk ; 
under such a spell men speak their minds freely, but 
they also reveal themselves. There is a gift of per- 
sonal quality which is more rare than the gift of 
thought. The thought of a great nature is precious, 
but the way in which it approaches the thought, and 
the significance it attaches to it, are still more valuable. 
Shakespeare was repeating a commonplace when he 
said, " We are such stuff as dreams are made of," but 
the commonplace became suddenly luminous and 
beautiful in a setting which turned its alloy into pure 
gold of insight and poetry. The mystery and sublim- 
ity of life were familiar ideas when they took posses- 
sion of Carlyle's imagination, but they returned from 
it flaming with an awful splendour which men had well- 
nigh forgotten. That which is really rare in a man is 
not his thought, but himself; and it is this self, so 



44 MY STUDY FIRE. 

hidden, so reticent, so marvellous, that somehow es- 
capes from him in talk. When one thinks of Lowell, 
he does not recall " The Cathedral," but some hour 
before the fire, or some ramble over the hills, when the 
man behind the work somehow escaped from all asso- 
ciation with it, and took on all the magic of a new 
acquaintance, added to the steadfast power of an old 
friend ; and of Emerson it is pre-eminently true that 
no one could really know him who had not come under 
the spell of his singular and indescribable personality. 
" Emerson's oration," wrote Lowell to a friend in 
1867, "was more disjointed than usual, even with 
him. It began nowhere and ended everywhere, and 
yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling 
that something beautiful had passed that way, — some- 
thing more beautiful than anything else, like the rising 
and setting of stars. ... He boggled, he lost his 
place, he had to put on his glasses ; but it was as if 
a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in 
our fogs, and it was our fault, not his." His works 
have a quality like light, and a purity as of snows 
caught in the high Alps ; but the man was still clearer 
and rarer, — a nature not to be reflected in print, how- 
ever skilfully ordered. It is this by-play of person- 
ality which gives talk a charm beyond all other forms 
of uttered speech. The literature one hears some- 
times seems so much richer than the literature one 
reads that there comes with the rarest privilege regret 
that so much wealth is being spent on a few. Nature 



THE MAGIC OF TALK. 45 

is always prodigal, however, and the supreme function 
of life is to produce great natures rather than great 
books. There is, moreover, a great hope hidden in 
this lavish indifference to the particular work and this 
steady emphasis on the superiority of the worker. 



WORK AND ART. 

The most mysterious and irritating quality in a work 
of art is the impression of ease which it conveys ; it 
seems to have been a piece of play ; we cannot asso- 
ciate work with it. Its charm lies in its detachment 
from this workaday world, and its suggestion of inti- 
macy with some other world where the most perfect 
things are done with a prodigal easefulness. Nobody 
ever happened upon Nature in her working hours ; 
apparently she is always at leisure. There is an illu- 
sion, however, in this apparent ease, which owes its 
power of deception to our limitations. As a matter of 
fact, Nature is never at rest ; she is always at work ; 
but her work is so instinctive, so entirely within the 
range of her force, so perfectly expressive of the energy 
behind it, that it is, in the deepest sense, play. There 
is no compulsion behind it, no shrinking from it, no 
strain in it ; it is quiet, easeful, normal, and adequate. 
The artist finds Nature a teacher in this as in other 
matters, and learns that the eternal charm of beauty 
pes in its complete severance from all trace of work. 
It is a bit of pure delight which comes to us from the 
few lines in which the lyric poet, with winning sim- 
plicity, records an impression or confides an experience, 



WORK AND ART. 47 

or from the few inches of canvas on which the artist 
preserves a swift glance at the landscape growing 
vague and mysterious in the twilight. The faintest 
odor of the lamp would empty the lines of their magic ; 
a hint of toil would destroy the illusion of a power 
behind the picture similar in kind, however inferior in 
degree, to that behind the landscape. 

Behind every bit of genuine art there lies a training, 
always arduous, sometimes rigorous to the point of 
pain. There is no greater popular fallacy than the 
impression that men of letters and artists of all kinds 
are men of leisure. They are, on the contrary, men 
whose work never ends, and whose mastery is not only 
secured, but sustained, at immense cost of time, 
strength, thought, emotion, and will. The grace which 
banishes the thought of toil was bought at a great 
price ; it is a flower whose roots have often been 
watered by tears. Its perfection lies in its effacement 
of the " painful steps and slow " by which it has been 
reached ; so that its highest success involves the com- 
plete forgetfulness of the toil behind. The artist 
whose touch on the keys has a magical ease which 
revives our childhood's faith in the world of the 
" Arabian Nights " is a heroic worker, who pays for 
his success a price from which most men of affairs 
would shrink back appalled. The writer whose hand 
rests so lightly on the strings of speech, and makes 
them sing or thunder with such indifferent ease, knows 
that " torment of style " which pursued Flaubert all 
his days, — that painful pursuit of free, sincere, and 



48 MY STUDY FIRE. 

noble expression, which is so constantly baffled, and 
so rarely touches the elusive goal. Two thousand 
and more sketches give a faint idea of the herculean 
toil behind Michel Angelo's " Last Judgment." 

From this toil genius is no more exempt than talent ; 
for perfection never comes by instinct ; it is always the 
final expression of a perfectly harmonised nature. 
Shakespeare had his years of apprenticeship not less 
necessary and arduous than those of Gray ; and Millet 
paid a great price for that marvellous skill of his. 
The first task laid upon the artist — the submission to 
the law of work when his mind is fomenting with all 
manner of spontaneous impulses — is so hard that art 
is allied forever to morality by the self-discipline which 
it involves ; but the second task — the obliteration of 
every evidence of toil — is still more difficult. It is at 
this point that the artist reveals himself. He sets out 
with a goodly company, eager for that training which 
guards the gates of artistic achievement ; but he is 
wellnigh deserted when he passes on into the next 
stage and begins to work with a free hand. Many men 
can work with sustained and noble energy, but very 
few men can transform work into play by coming to do 
instinctively, and with the ease of almost unconscious 
mastery, that which they began to do with deliberation 
and intention. In art it is pre-eminently and painfully 
true that many are called but few are chosen ; and 
there is something pathetic, almost tragic, in the pains- 
taking and tireless toil which is always climbing but 
which never plucks the flower of ease. For this reason 



WORK AND ART. 49 

there is a great gulf set between the amateur and the 
artist which is never crossed ; for the artist is the ser- 
vant of toil that he may become the master of his craft, 
while the amateur, by evading the service, forever for- 
feits the mastery. It is this last gift of ease that evi- 
dences genius and shows that the workman has become 
a magician, — one who knows how to make the flower 
bloom without the aid of botany, and the stars shine 
without invoking astronomy. He who once did things 
as work now does them as play, and, therefore, in the 
creative spirit and with the creative force and simplicity. 
When he was an apprentice he could explain his 
methods, but now that he is a master the thing he does 
with consummate skill and with such a touch of finality 
is as much a mystery to him as to others ; it is no 
longer a contrivance, it is the deep and beautiful 
product of his whole nature working together with that 
mysterious force that resides in a rich personality. 

There is something baffling in the quality of these 
final touches in art. Why should these few lines on 
paper, this bit of marble, this little group of verses, 
stand apart from the toiling world as if they belonged 
to another order of life and had their affinities with the 
things that grow and bloom rather than with those that 
are made and perish in the making? Why should a 
civilisation fade out of human memory, and the delicate 
vase or the fragile lyric survive ? The answer to these 
questions is found in Alfred de Musset's deep saying, 
" It takes a great deal of life to make a little art." In 
this vast workshop of life, with its dust and sweat and 
4 



50 MY STUDY FIRE. 

din, it is the worker that is perfected oftener than the 
work ; and when some bit of perfection emerges from 
the dust and turmoil, it not only explains and justifies 
the toil behind it, but takes on a beauty which is half a 
prophecy. 

A civilisation is not lost if, beyond the mysterious 
training of men which it silently effects, it leaves behind 
a few final touches, strokes, and songs as a bequest to 
that art which, by its very perfection, is the visible evi- 
dence of immortality. For when the worker so mas- 
ters his material that skill is no longer mechanical but 
vital, no longer wholly calculated but largely instinc- 
tive, he becomes the instrument of a genius greater 
than his, and the channel of a truth deeper than any 
he has compassed. He escapes the limitations of the 
artisan and gains the freedom of the artist — to whom 
finality of expression is as natural as the gush of song 
from the wood or the glow of light in the east. For 
the highest form of all things is beauty; and art, in 
tha<" deep sense which allies it with the spontaneity, 
the ease, the grace, and the play of nature, is the 
finality for which all toil prepares and in which all 
work ends. It takes centuries to make the soil, and 
then, born of earth and nurtured by the sky, blooms 
the flower, without care or toil, mysterious and inex- 
plicable, — the touch of the imperishable beauty resting 
for an hour on its fragile petals. 



JOY IN LIFE. 

Browning's "Saul " is one of those superb outbursts 
of poetic force which have for modern ears, accustomed 
to overmuch smooth, careful, and uninspired versifica- 
tion, not only the charm of beauty and energy in high 
degree, but of contrast as well. It sweeps along, eager, 
impetuous, resistless as the streams which descend the 
Alps and rush seaward with the joy of mountain tor- 
rents. So much contemporary verse is dainty, melo- 
dious, and unimpassioned that the tumultuous music of 
a virile song, overflowing all the shallow channels of 
artifice, and sweeping into the deep courses of human 
experience and emotion, is as thrilling as a glimpse of 
the sea after long hours on some pretty lake in some 
well-ordered park. Great art of any kind involves a 
great temperament even more than great intellect; 
since the essence of art is never intellectual, but always 
the complete expression of the whole nature. A great 
temperament is a rarer gift than a great mind ; and it 
is the distinctive gift of the artist. Browning had the 
vitality, the freshness of feeling, the eagerness of inter- 
est, the energy of spirit, which witness this tempera- 
ment. He had an intense joy in life simply as life, in 
nature simply as nature, without reference to what lay 



52 MY STUDY FIRE. 

behind. For one must feel freshly and powerfully 
through the senses before one can represent the inner 
meaning of life and nature in art. In " Saul " there 
are elements of profound psychologic interest, but first 
and foremost there is the intense and vivid conscious- 
ness of the glory of life for a healthy human being, 
and of the splendour of the world. Rarely has this 
superb health found such thrilling expression as on the 
lips of the young poet beguiling the furious spirit in 
the mighty Saul : — 

"Oh, our manhood's prime vigour ! no spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool 

silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust 

divine, 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 

wine, 
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy 1 " 

After the wailing monotones and the chorus of lam- 
entation which of late years have risen in .so many 
quarters, such music as this song of David's thrills the 
blood like a bugle-call ; and such a victorious strain was 
the natural prelude to the great vision of faith in which 
the song rises to its noble climax. 



JOY IN LIFE. 53 

Brilliancy of temperament and the freshness and 
spontaneity of feeling which go with it are a part of 
the inheritance of such men as Gautier, whose virile 
face, with its great shock of yellow hair, had at times 
a leonine aspect ; but one hardly anticipates the pos- 
session of such gifts by a sick and overburdened man 
like Richard Jefferies, who was so long in finding his 
field, and who, when it was found, had so short a 
working-day in it. This temperament is, however, in 
a way, independent of physical condition; it is much 
more the buoyancy of a rich nature than the surplusage 
of a strong physique. In his last years Jefferies rivalled 
Heine in the intensity of his sufferings, but to the very 
end he answered the appeal of nature to the senses 
with passionate longing. In such men vitality triumphs 
over all moods and asserts the sovereignty of life even 
while life is swiftly receding from them. Few men 
have known the black shadows on the landscape more 
intimately than Jefferies, and rarely have these shadows 
been reflected with more appalling realism than in 
some of his pages. " Our bodies," he says, " are full 
of unsuspected flaws, handed down, it may be, for 
thousands of years, and it is of these that we die, and 
not of natural decay. . . . The truth is, we die through 
our ancestors ; we are murdered by our ancestors. 
Their dead hands stretch forth from the tomb and drag 
us down to their mouldering bones." All the horror 
of Ibsen's " Ghosts" is condensed in that last sen- 
tence ; it falls on the ear like the sudden clang of the 
bell on the ear of the man waiting for the guillotine. 



54 MY STUDY FIRE. 

And yet Jefferies, being a really noble artist in the 
force of his feeling for nature and his power of record- 
ing her phenomena and reflecting her moods, had the 
deep, natural joyousness and the invincible vitality of 
the artistic temperament. He was sensitive to those 
gradations of colour and form of which the less gifted 
observer takes no account. " Colour and form and 
light," he says, "are as magic to me; it is a trance; 
it requires a language of ideas to express it. ... A 
fagot, the outline of a leaf, low tints without reflecting 
power, strike the eye as a bell the ear. To me they 
are intensely clear, and the clearer the greater the 
pleasure. It is often too great, for it takes me away 
from solid pursuits merely to receive the impression, 
as water is still to receive the trees." With this quick 
impressionability there goes a passionate love of life 
and a passionate longing to have it flowing through 
him like a tide instead of ebbing with an ever-feebler 
current. In that heart-breaking book, " The Story of 
My Heart," this longing breaks from him in an anguish 
of unsatisfied desire : — 

" There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where 
the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit 
waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the har- 
vest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back ; its 
strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone 
above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet 
and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and 
the sea, the glow of the sun, filled me ; I touched the 
surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened 



JOY IN LIFE. 55 

my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the 
waves — my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed 
with the sea's might. Give me fulness of life like to the 
sea and sun, and to the earth and the air ; give me ful- 
ness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness ; 
give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all 
things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in 
me like a tide — give it to me with all the force of 
the sea!" 

To some people this outcry for abundance of life 
and the joy of the senses may seem like a pagan 
mood; but if it be, it is a form of paganism sadly 
needed in these days of depression and debility. One 
would better be a frank and healthy pagan than a dis- 
eased and wailing pessimist; for paganism had its 
faith, its ideals, and its glorious productiveness, while a 
despairing melancholy has nothing but its own morbid 
self-consciousness. A return to the right kind of pa- 
ganism might deliver us from some of the evils which 
have ensnared us. But the essence of the longing for 
the joy of the senses and for fulness of life, expressed 
in so many ways by so many men of artistic nature, is 
not sensuousness but vitality ; it is the hunger of the 
whole nature for a deeper draught at the fountain 
whence its being flows ; and its presence in the artist 
temperament explains its presence in great art. For 
the great art of the w r orld is instinct with vitality ; it 
overflows with life; it is full of joy and strength. 
Touching, as it does so constantly, the tragic themes, 
it is not mastered by them, but interprets them in the 



56 MY STUDY FIRE. 

light of those higher laws whose servants we are. 
Shakespeare turns away from no tragic situation, and 
shrinks from no tragic problem ; but how serene he is, 
and what marvellous freshness of feeling shines through 
his work and gives it the touch of that Nature whose 
dews fall with every eve, and whose flowers bloom 
afresh with every dawn ! 



THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 

There is, perhaps, no better test of mastership in 
any kind of artistic work than the effacement of the 
method by which the result is secured. A true work 
of art can never be taken apart ; it is a living whole, and, 
although much may be said about it by way of analy- 
sis or of criticism, it is impossible to explain how it 
was put together. The same distinction exists be- 
tween pedantry and culture ; the trail of the pedant 
can be followed through his library back to the point 
from which he set out ; he never for an instant gets 
off the beaten path. The man of culture, on the other 
hand, suggests his methods of personal training and 
enrichment no more than he suggests the air he 
breathes. He is so ripe in tone, so easily in com- 
mand of his resources, and so sure of his tenure that 
there is no touch of professionalism about him. His 
personality is so rich and so interesting that one for- 
gets that he is a writer or a painter or an orator. Mr. 
Booth found genuine pleasure in Mr. Sargent's strik- 
ing portrait because it is free from all suggestion of 
the stage ; it is the portrait of a man, not of an actor. 
And Mr. Booth was a charming example of a great 
artist devoid of the atmosphere of professionalism. 



58 MY STUDY FIRE. 

His talk touched naturally on incidents and themes 
which appealed to him by reason of his profession, 
and often lingered about experiences which had been 
part of his arduous and brilliant career; but it was 
the talk of a man of distinct individuality and force, 
not of an actor fitted into the grooves of a profession 
and moulded entirely to its uses. 

The phrase " man of letters " is a happy one, because 
it emphasises the individual quality rather than the 
form of its expression; because it brings the man 
rather than the profession before us. One of the 
signs of mastery in art is freedom from mannerisms, 
from professional methods of securing effects. The 
finest orators have no set manner ; the most inspiring 
preachers are free from the clerical habit and air; 
the greatest writers are the most difficult to imitate, 
because they offer the fewest obvious peculiarities. 
The real man of letters is always a man primarily, and 
a writer secondarily. His fingers are not blackened 
with ink, and his talk is devoid of that kind of pedan- 
try which is never happy unless its theme is the latest 
book. 

The love of literature is one of the noblest of human 
passions, but it has many degrees, and it is, unfortu- 
nately, easily imitated. There are a good many men 
and women who take up literary subjects and interests 
as they take up the latest fashions, — putting them on, 
so to speak, as they put on garments of the latest cut. 
There are so-called literary circles as devoid of true 
feeling for literature as the untutored tourist, restlessly 



THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 59 

rushing through art galleries with his Baedeker in his 
hand, is devoid of any real insight into art or love for 
it. Writers of force and originality are often slow in 
coming to their own, and are sometimes suddenly 
discovered by the many, long after they have been 
well known to the few ; but the waves of interest in 
particular writers which sweep over society are a hollow 
mockery of any real and genuine knowledge. To rush 
wildly with the maddened throng after Browning for 
one short winter, to be diverted the next season by 
Ibsen, is to carefully destroy all hope of coming into 
real contact with either of these writers. A real love 
of art is shy of crowds, and wary of too close contact 
with " circles ; " it does not protest too much ; it 
hates, above all things, that pretentious use of techni- 
cal phrases and that putting forward of the latest " dis- 
covery " which so often pass as literary conversation. 

The spread of a sincere, unobtrusive, and teachable 
interest in books and other forms of art among the 
people of this country is a thing to recognise and 
rejoice in wherever it appears. It is not the crudity 
of undeveloped interest which is to be dreaded, but 
the crudity of sham interest ; and the sham element 
is to be detected by its simulation of that which it 
does not possess. It is pretentious, and therefore it 
is essentially vulgar. It mistakes talk about books for 
that kind of conversation which is supposed to go on 
among literary folk ; it dwells long and lovingly on 
personal contact with second and third rate authors ; 
its test of literary quality is the professional air and 



60 MY STUDY FIRE. 

manner. It gathers its small verse-writers, whom it 
profanely calls poets, listens to their smooth and hol- 
low lines, applauds, drinks its tea, and goes home in 
the happy faith that it has poured another libation at 
the shrine of art. There is just now, and there proba- 
bly will be for some time to come, a great deal of this 
sham love of literature in society; it is to be hoped 
that a sounder culture will some day make an end 
of it. 

For the real love of books, like the real genius to 
write them, cometh not by observation ; its roots are 
in the soul, and, being a part of a man's deepest na- 
ture, it is shy of any expression that departs a hair's 
line from absolute sincerity and simplicity. It detests 
the signs and insignia of professionalism; it shrinks 
from exploitation ; it resents the profanation of that 
publicity which fastens on the manner in which the 
thing is done rather than on its aim and spirit. The 
world is prone to love wonders; it cares much more 
for the miracle than for the power which the miracle 
discloses, or the truth which it reveals. It has been 
in every age the anguish of the worker of wonders 
that he was sought as a magician rather than as a 
revealer of the mystery of life ; and it is the prevalence 
of this spirit which makes the man of real artistic 
spirit so often indifferent to contemporary praise. 

The simplicity and sincerity of a great man of letters 
have rarely been more clearly or attractively revealed 
than in the recently published correspondence of Sir 
Walter Scott. The enormous productivity of the great 



THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 6 1 

novelist was conditioned on long and arduous work ; 
it would seem as if a man who was pouring out, through 
so many years, an unbroken stream of narrative would 
have become, in interest and habit no less than in oc- 
cupation, a story-writer and nothing but a story-writer. 
But this is precisely what Scott did not become. The 
smell of ink is never upon his garments ; he seems to 
care for everything under the Scotch heavens except 
books. Professionalism never gets the better of him, 
and he goes on to the tragical but noble end telling 
stories like a true-hearted man rather than like a trained 
raconteur. Other and lesser men may squander body 
and soul for a few new sensations, a little addition to 
literary capital ; Scott remains sane, simple, and whole- 
some to the last day. One can imagine his scorn of 
literary fads, and of those who follow them ; for litera- 
ture was to him, not a matter of phrases and manner- 
isms and social conventions, — it was as simple, as 
native, and as much of out-of-doors as the Highlands 
whose secrets he discovered. There is a fine uncon- 
sciousness of any special gifts or calling in his letters ; 
he writes about himself, as about all other things, in a 
natural key. Upon the appearance of " St. Ronan's 
Well," in 1824, Lady Abercorn tells him how greatly 
the book has affected her. " I like the whole book," 
she says ; " it, like all the rest of those novels, makes 
one feel at home, and a party concerned. . . . Every- 
body reads these novels, and talks of them quite as 
much as the people do in England. . . . People are 
still curious as ever to find out the Author." And the 



62 MY STUDY FIRE. 

"Author," at the flood-tide of the most magnificent 
popular success in the history of English literature, 
replies at length, touching upon the novels in a purely 
objective and semi-humourous spirit, and then goes 
on to talk about his boy Charles, who is soon to leave 
for Oxford; about his "black-eyed lassie," who is 
" dancing away merrily ; " about his nephew Walter, 
and about many other personal and every-day matters 
which touch the man, but which have nothing to do 
with the writing of books. The soundness of the 
Waverley Novels comes from the soundness of the 
simple, brave, true-hearted Sir Walter. 

" My dear," he said to Lockhart, as he lay dying 
that September day; "my dear, be a good man." 
There is a tonic quality in such unconsciousness on 
the part of a man so opulent in some of the finest 
literary gifts, — a man of childlike nature, who drew 
his wonderful stories from the hills rather than from 
his libraries ; who was not shaken by the storm of 
popularity which burst upon him, nor dismayed by 
the disaster which threw its shadow like a vast eclipse 
on his magical prosperity; a great writer, who was 
first and always a man. It is well to seek refuge in 
such a great career from the passing fashions of the 
hour, from the exaggerations of unintelligent and ca- 
pricious praise of commonplace men, and from that 
idle following of art which has as little veracity and 
reality in it as the rush and huzza of the crowd about 
the local statesman returned to his ward after a brief 
foreign tour. 



LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 

One of the happiest evidences that work has become 
play, and the strenuous temper of the artisan has 
given place to the artist's ease of mood, is that peculiar 
lightness of touch which is so elusive, so difficult, and 
yet so full of the ultimate charm of art. Does not 
Professor J. R. Seeley miss the point when he says : 
" Literature is perhaps at best a compromise between 
truth and fancy, between seriousness and trifling. It 
cannot do without something of popularity, and yet 
the writer who thinks much of popularity is unfaithful 
to his mission ; on the other hand, he who leans too 
heavily upon literature breaks through it into science 
or into practical business " ? He is speaking of 
Goethe, who sometimes leans so heavily on his art 
that he breaks through into philosophy, and whose 
verse, in didactic moods, comes perilously near prose ; 
but is his general statement of the matter adequate or 
accurate? There is, it is true, literature so light in 
treatment and so unsubstantial in thought that it is 
distinctly trifling. "The Rape of the Lock," for 
instance, is in one sense a trifle, but as a trifle it is so 
perfect that it betrays a strong and steady hand behind 
it. Professor Seeley does not, however, limit the 



64 MY STUDY FIRE. 

application of his statement ; he evidently means to 
suggest that there is an element of trifling in literature 
as an art, for he puts it in antithesis with seriousness. 
Is there not an imperfect idea of art involved in this 
statement, and does not Professor Seeley confuse the 
ease and grace of literature with trifling? 

There is, especially among English-speaking peoples, 
a lack of the artistic instinct, nowhere more discernible 
than in the inability to take art itself seriously, and in 
the tendency to impute to it a lack which inheres not in 
art itself, but in the perception of the critic. Moral 
seriousness is a very noble quality, but it is by no means 
the only form of seriousness. It may even be suspected 
that there is something beyond it, — a seriousness less 
strenuous, and therefore less obvious, but a seriousness 
more fundamental because more reposeful, and sus- 
tained by a wider range of relationships. Strain and 
stress have a dramatic as well as a moral interest, and 
often quite obscure those silent and unobtrusive victories 
which are won, not without sore struggle, but without 
dust and tumult. There are few things so deceptive as 
the lightness of touch which evidences the presence of 
the highest art ; it means that the man is doing crea- 
tively what he once did mechanically. It is the very 
highest form of seriousness, because it has forgotten that 
it is serious ; it has passed through self-consciousness 
into that unconscious mood in which a man does the 
noblest and most beautiful things of which he is cap- 
able, without taking thought that they are noble or 
beautiful. In the unfolding of character, where moral 



LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 65 

aims are most distinct and moral processes most con- 
stant, there must come a time when a man is genuine 
and sound, as nature is fruitful, by the law of his own 
being. He passes beyond the stage when he needs 
to say to himself every hour and with intensest self- 
consciousness, " I must do right ; " it becomes his 
habit to do right. 

Lightness of touch is not based on lack of serious- 
ness ; it is, rather, the product of a seriousness which 
no longer obtrudes itself, because it has served its 
purpose. Shakespeare was not less serious when he 
wrote the exquisite calendar of flowers in " The 
Winter's Tale " than when he drew the portrait of 
Hector, but he was a greater artist ; he had mastered 
his material more completely ; he had touched the 
ultimate goal of his art. His touch is infinitely lighter 
in "The Tempest," where his imagination plays with 
the freedom and ease of a natural force, than in 
"Troilus and Cressida," where he more than once 
leans too heavily on poetry and breaks through into 
philosophy. The philosophy is extremely interesting, 
but it is not poetry ; it rather illustrates the difference 
between the strenuous and the artistic mood, and 
throws a clear light on the process of evolution by 
which the heavy touch is transformed into that light, 
sure, self-effacing touch which gives us the thing to be 
expressed without any consciousness of the manner of 
the expression. 

Milton's voice has great compass and his manner 
great nobleness in " Paradise Lost," but the purest 

5 



66 MY STUDY FIRE. 

and therefore the best poetry that came from his hand 
is to be found in " L' Allegro," "II Penseroso," "Lyci- 
das," the masque of " Comus," and the fragments of 
the "Arcades." These tender and beautiful lyrics, in 
which nobility of idea and ease of manner are so 
perfectly blended, were the products of the poet's 
most harmonious hours, when he was not less a Puri- 
tan because he was so much more the poet; when 
his mood was not less serious, but his relation to his 
time had less of self-consciousness in it; when he 
touched the deepest themes with consummate grace 
and lightness. 

Goethe is at his best when his touch is lightest, and 
at his worst when it is heaviest. His lyrics are un- 
surpassed in that magical ease whose secret is known 
only to the masters of verse ; he is as spontaneous, 
unforced, and fresh as a mountain rivulet. In his 
letters to Schiller he emphasises the dependence of 
the poet on the unconscious, creative mood. When 
this mood possesses him, the didactic tendency dis- 
appears, and the glowing spirit of poetry shines in 
song, ballad, and lyrical romance ; he is all fire, grace, 
and lightness. But when the spontaneous mood for- 
sakes him, and he writes by force of his training and 
skill, how slow and heavy is his flight, how cold and 
obvious his touch ! He is nowhere more in earnest 
than in these inimitable songs, and has nowhere else a 
touch so devoid of manner, so instinct with grace and 
freedom. 

The lightness of touch which charms us in literature 



LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 67 

is not trifling; it is mastery. Whoever possesses it 
has gotten the better of his materials and of himself, 
and has brought both into subjection to that creative 
mood which pours itself out in finalities and perfec- 
tions of speech and form as naturally as the vitality of 
a plant bursts into a flower which is both obviously 
and inexplicably beautiful. Whenever we come upon 
lightness of touch, we are in contact with a work of 
art ; whenever we miss it, the work that lacks it may 
be noble, worthy, full of evidences of genius, but it is 
not a work of supreme artistic excellence. 



THE POETS' CORNER. 

On dark days, when the fire sings its merry song in 
the teeth of sullen winds, the poets' corner is a place 
of refuge. There the great singers stand, row upon 
row, a silent but immortal choir ; and the serene face 
of Emerson hangs on the little space of wall beside 
them. In the glorious company are those who sang 
the first notes in the earliest dawn of history, and those 
whose voices are just rising above the turmoil of to-day. 
What a vast movement of life have they set to music, 
and how many generations have they stirred to heroism 
or charmed into forgetfulness ! There have been great 
teachers, but none so persuasive as these ; there have 
been great leaders, but none so inspiring as these. I 
have often envied the Athenian boy sans grammar, sans 
arithmetic, sans reading-books, sans science primer; 
with no text-book but his Homer, but with Homer 
stored in his memory and locked in his heart. To be 
educated on the myths — those rich, deep interpreta- 
tions of life — and upon the heroic history of one's 
race; to have constantly before the imagination, not 
isolated incidents and unrelated facts, but noble figures 
and splendid achievements ; to breathe the atmosphere 
of a religion interwoven with the story of one's race, 



THE POETS CORNER. 6g 

and to approach all this at the feet of a great poet — 
were ever children more fortunate? And when it 
comes to results, was ever educational system so fruit- 
ful as that which in the little city of Athens, in the 
brief period of a century and a half, produced a group 
of men whose superiority as soldiers, statesmen, poets, 
orators, architects, sculptors, and philosophers seems 
somehow to have been secured without effort, so per- 
fectly is the spirit of their achievements expressed in 
the forms which they took on? The superiority of 
that training lay in its recognition of the imagination, 
and in its appeal, not to the intellect alone, but to the 
whole nature. We have great need of science, and 
science has been a grave and wise teacher, but the 
heart of life and the meaning of it belong to poetry ; 
for poetry, as Wordsworth says, is " the impassioned 
expression which is in the face of all science." Science 
gives us the face, but poetry gives us the countenance 
— which is the soul irradiating its mask and revealing 
itself. 

Upon all those who " cannot heare the Plannet-like 
Musick of Poetrie," Sir Philip Sidney, a poet in deed 
as in word, called down the direful curse, " in the be- 
halfe of all Poets,'' " that while you live, you live in 
love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a Sonnet ; 
and when you die, your memory die from the earth for 
want of an Epitaph." The range of that curse is 
more limited than appears at first sight, for while it is 
true that many of us have never listened to the chil- 
dren of the Muses, those of us are few who are not in 



JO MY STUD Y FIRE. 

some way poets. We call ourselves practical, and im- 
agine, in our ignorance, that there is a certain supe- 
riority in thus separating ourselves from the idealists, 
the dreamers, the singers. But Nature is wiser than 
we, and suffers us to apply these belittling epithets to 
ourselves, but all the time keeps us in contact with the 
living streams of poetry. The instant our nobler in- 
stincts are appealed to, and we cease to be traffickers 
and become fathers, mothers, children, lovers, patriots, 
we become poets. To get away from poetry one must 
begin by emptying the universe of God ; to rid life of 
poetry one must end by following the hint of the great 
pessimist and persuading men to commit universal sui- 
cide. While the days come to us with such radiancy 
of dawn, and depart from us with such splendour of 
eve; while flowers bloom, and birds sing, and winds 
sport with clouds ; while mountains hold their sublime 
silence against the horizon, and the sea sings its end- 
less monotone ; while hope, faith, and love teach their 
great lessons, and win us to work, sacrifice, purity, and 
devotion, — we shall be poets in spite of ourselves and 
whether we know it or not. There is no choice about 
the matter; there is a divine compulsion in it; we 
must be poets because we are immortal. 

But there is a great difference between being or 
doing something by compulsion, and being or doing 
something by choice. They only get the joy of poetry 
who love it and make fellowship with it. The richest 
poetry must always be that which lies in one's soul, in 
its deep and silent communion with nature and with 



THE POETS' CORNER. J I 

life ; but this unuttered and, in a true sense, unutter- 
able poetry, becomes more definite and available as a 
resource if we make intimate friends with the masters 
of poetical expression. Shakespeare saw more of life 
than falls to the lot of all save his greatest readers; 
perhaps no one has yet brought to his pages the same 
degree of force and veracity of insight which are to be 
found in them. To read Shakespeare, therefore, is, 
for the greatest no less than for the least, a resource of 
the noblest kind ; it is an interpretation of life through 
the imagination ; a disclosure of what lies in its depths, 
to be revealed only when those depths are stirred by 
the tempests of passion, or by some searching experi- 
ence. A recent writer says that Shakespeare is to 
mankind at large what a man of perfect vision would be 
in a world of half-blind persons, — people who saw 
nothing clearly or accurately. Shakespeare does not 
describe an imaginary race and a visionary world ; he 
describes men as they are, and the world as it is ; the 
sense of unreality in his work, if one has it, comes 
from one's own limitations of sight. In other words, 
it is not the so-called practical mind which sees things 
as they are, but the mind of imaginative force and 
poetic insight. We move about in a world half real- 
ised, full of dim figures, vague outlines, hazy vistas ; 
Shakespeare lived in a world which lay in clear light, 
and which he searched through and through with those 
marvellous glances of his. Who has read English his- 
tory with such an eye as the greatest of English poets ? 
Hume recites the facts about Henry V. in an orderly 
and careful manner, but Shakespeare looks into the 



72 MY STUDY FIRE. 

soul of the robust and virile king, and makes us see, 
not the trappings and insignia of power, but the inte- 
rior source of that authority which flung the English 
yeomen like a foaming wave over the walls of Harfleur. 
The diamond is none the less in the quartz because we 
fail to see it, and the heroic and tragic possibilities are 
not lacking in hosts of human lives which seem entirely 
commonplace to most of us. That which makes some 
ages so much more inspiring and productive than 
others is not so much a difference in the material at 
hand as in the skill and power with which the possi- 
bilities of that material are discerned and turned to 
account ; men do not differ so much in the possession 
of opportunities as in the clearness of sight to discern 
them and the force to make the most of them. This 
world can never be commonplace save to the dull and 
unseeing ; and life can never be devoid of tragic in- 
terest save to those who fail to recognise the elements 
at work in every community and in every individual 
soul. 

The men of poetic mind have many gifts, but none 
so rare and of such moment to their fellows as this 
clearness of vision. To really see clearly into the soul 
of things is one of the rarest of gifts, and it is the 
characteristic gift of the poetic imagination. That 
second harvest of which Emerson speaks is reaped 
only by the sickle of the imagination ; to the common 
vision it does not even exist. This round world is 
distinctly visible to the dullest mind ; but to such a 
mind the beauty, wonder, and mystery in which its 
secret lies hidden, are as if they were not. Men walk 



THE POETS' CORNER. 73 

through life almost without consciousness of the daily 
miracle performed under their eyes ; they become so 
familiar with their surroundings that they lose the sense 
of awe and wonder which flows from the clear per- 
ception of the fathomless sea of force in which all 
things are borne onward. One may drop his plummet 
in the nearest pool, and, behold, it also is fathomless. 
Every path leads into the presence of that infinite 
power to which we give different names, but which is 
the one great and eternal reality behind these appari- 
tions of to-day. Now, of this unseen but sublime 
presence the imagination keeps us continually con- 
scious ; and the great poetic minds, in prose and 
verse, — in Plato's " Dialogues " and in Dante's " Di- 
vine Comedy," — fulfil their highest office in seeing 
and compelling us to see the spirit -behind the form, 
the soul within the body. In the records which the 
imagination has kept in the art of the world are written 
the true story of the soul of man, the authentic his- 
tory of his life on earth. And the charm of this reve- 
lation lies in its freshness, its variety, and its beauty. 
It does not preserve the past after the manner of the 
historians by pressing it like dried and faded flowers 
between the leaves of massive quartos ; it preserves 
the very vitality which flowered centuries ago. The 
one supreme quality by which it lives is its marvellous 
life, — that life which keeps Ulysses still sailing the an- 
cient seas, and Romeo still young and beautiful with 
the passion which, in spite of its own short life, is the 
evidence of immortality. 



THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. 

The first warm spring days stir something like 
resentment against those ascetic and monastic ideas 
which for so many centuries set men at odds with 
nature, and almost broke the bonds between them. 
There is a delight in life which is often called pagan, 
so grossly has Christianity been misread. This delight, 
born of the pure joy of the mind in recognising the 
beauty of the world and its own inalienable share in it, 
is quite as much a duty as the most definite moral 
obligation ; but a long education will be needed before 
the real meaning of beauty is discerned, and the har- 
mony between man and nature, shattered by Latin 
medievalism, is restored. Meantime, fortunate are 
they to whom the bloom of the world is a never-ending 
joy, and who are able to snatch this unforced delight 
in an age when so few things are sought spontaneously, 
and so many are striven for with a strenuousness which 
defeats itself. 

There was a great deal of Christianity in Paganism, 
if one goes to the New Testament for his ideals ; and 
there is, accordingly, a great deal of Paganism coming 
out in Christianity. The world is as beautiful as it 
was before the shadow of a divisive thought of himself 



THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. ?$ 

made man a stranger in the house built for him with a 
splendour fit for immortal spirits ; and the alien begins 
once more to find himself at home under the kindly 
stars and amid the ministrations of the seasons. There 
are few things which the modern world needs more 
than the power to take the joy of the moment, without 
that blighting afterthought which scatters every rose in 
barren analysis, and flings every fragment of gold into 
the crucible. The first use of the world is to see it, 
and get the delight which comes from the vision ; but 
here are hosts of men so bent upon understanding 
v things are made that they pull them to pieces 
odiure they have really looked at them. One longs at 
times for the mood of the myth-makers, who often mis- 
read the facts, but who had a rare faculty of getting at 
the truth, and who had the joy of seeing the world as a 
great living whole, overflowing with beauty and divinity. 
There were greater things to learn in nature than some 
of the Greek poets saw ; but they had a true instinct 
for getting into intimate relations with nature, and they 
knew how to enrich themselves with the loveliness 
which encircled them in sky and sea and woodland. 
There is a charm in Theocritus, for instance, with which 
the dawning summer puts one in renewed fellowship ; 
a charm which seems to disclose a new reality when 
the advancing season becomes its comment and illus- 
tration. That charm resides in an immense capacity 
for enjoyment ; in the power of surrendering one's self 
to the moment so completely that one slips the bonds 
of consciousness and loses himself in the flowing life of 



J6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the world. When one has, so to speak, shed himself, 
he is in the way of some of the rarest joys which mor- 
tal lips ever taste — joys as pure and sweet as any that 
are yielded to the highest moods. " The unconscious- 
ness of the child," says Froebel, "is rest in God," — a 
very deep and beautiful saying, which we shall do well 
to lay to heart. Too many of us are under the delu- 
sion that nothing counts save activity, and that to rest 
in nature at times is to commit the sin of slothfulness. 

The herdsmen whom Theocritus has immortalised 
were not always models of conscious rectitude, but 
they are often models of unconscious enjoyment. 
They note the seasons by a thousand delicate signs, 
and they mark the hours by a registry of time more 
sensitive than that on any dial. The sky, the clouds, 
the sea, have perpetual interest for them ; and birds, 
leaves, winds, and flowers so mingle with their thoughts 
and occupations that the inward and the outward hap- 
penings seem all of a piece. Nature has share in 
every moment, and divides her fruits and charms as if 
there were a secret contract between the fruit-bearer 
and the fruit-taker ; between the brook and the figure 
that bends over it ; between the sloping hillside and 
the herdsman who feeds his flock on the grass creeping 
close to the olive-trees. 

" Thyrsis, let honey and the honeycomb 
Fill thy sweet mouth, and figs of ^igilus : 
For ne'er cicala trilled so sweet a song. 
Here is the cup ; mark, friend, how sweet it smells : 
The Hours, thou 'It say, have washed it in their well." 



THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. J J 

We have gone a long way in our real education 
when we have learned how to yield ourselves com- 
pletely to the hour and the scene, for in this mood we 
learn secrets which defy our keenest scrutiny. Nature 
often has things to say to our silence which remain 
unspoken while we insist upon having speech with her. 
To sit at her feet is often more fruitful than to persist 
in putting our thought into her mind. Above all, to 
surrender ourselves to her mood is to feel her beauty 
with a keenness of delight which is like the adding of 
a new joy to life. To those who are preoccupied with 
their own thoughts a whole realm of happiness is as 
effectively closed as if it were walled and barred. To 
leave ourselves at home and go into the woods to find 
what is there, and not what we have brought there, is 
to come into a kingdom of God which, being without 
us, illuminates with a new and kindling light the 
kingdom within us. There are a delicacy of colour, a 
charm of changefulness, a swiftly shifting loveliness, 
which elude our hours of self-consciousness and 
reserve their enchantment for our moments of self- 
forgetfulness. As we open ourselves to these elusive 
influences, they not only silently steal into our souls, 
but they become more real and more constant. A 
new sense, or rather a new delicacy of sense, is born 
within us ; we hear sounds which were inaudible 
before, and we see things that were invisible to our 
preoccupation. 

And from this freshening of perception there comes 
not only a new joy in nature, but a new insight into 



78 MY STUDY FIRE. 

poetry. For the poets find their sphere in the obser- 
vation and record of this more delicate and unobtru- 
sive loveliness, and their power of beguiling us out of 
ourselves lies in their faculty of finer vision. No truer 
disclosure of this sensitiveness of spirit to the beauty of 
the world has recently been made than that which 
finds its record in William Watson's invocation to 
" The First Skylark of Spring : " — 

" The springtime bubbled in his throat, 
The sweet sky seemed not far above, 
And young and lovesome came the note ; 
Ah, thine is Youth and Love. 

" Thou sing'st of what he knew of old, 
And dreamlike from afar recalls ; 
In flashes of forgotten gold 
An Orient glory falls. 

" And as he listens, one by one 

Life's utmost splendours blaze more nigh: 
Less inaccessible the sun, 
Less alien grows the sky. 

" For thou art native to the spheres, 
And of the courts of heaven art free, 
And carriest to his temporal ears 
News from eternity. 

" And lead'st him to the dizzy verge, 

And lur'st him o'er the dazzling line, 
Where mortal and immortal merge, 
And human dies divine." 



THE LOWELL LETTERS. 



It has long been the habit of many people to speak 
of letter-writing as a lost art, and to intimate that its 
disappearance is a phase of that deterioration of mind 
and manners which is constantly charged upon the 
spread of the democratic idea. Suits of armour having 
been relegated to the Tower, and the splendid dress 
of the Renaissance period no longer charming the eye 
save on festive occasions, the habit of exchanging con- 
fidences and opinions at length between friends has 
gone the way of all the earth ! That there has been 
a change in the manner of letter-writing is beyond 
question, but that the change has been a deterioration 
is more than doubtful. When Mile de Scudery wrote 
" The Grand Cyrus," nothing short of the most stately 
figures, the most elaborate style, and a long row of 
volumes would suffice for a dignified romance ; to- 
day we have some very humble people, some very 
simple speech, and a single volume of moderate size 
for the story of " Adam Bede." Will any one say, 
therefore, that the novel has lost dignity, power, or 
reality? In these days friends no longer constitute 
themselves reporters and news-gatherers, as in the 



80 MY STUDY FIRE. 

time when the news-letter, written over a cup of choco- 
late in some London coffee-house, was the principal 
means of communication between the metropolis and 
the provinces. Changed conditions involve changed 
methods and manners, but not necessarily worse ones. 
French women have a genius and a training for social 
life, for living together in a real and true way, from which 
women of the English-speaking race are, as a rule, 
debarred. Our strong and persistent sense of person- 
ality has certain fine rewards, but it costs a good deal 
on the side of free and intimate relationship with others. 
There are half a dozen groups of letters written by 
French women which may be said to fix the standard 
of this kind of writing ; but those who know the France 
of to-day intimately declare that this art was never 
practised with more skill and charm than at this 
moment. 

However the case may be in France, it is certain 
that this century has been peculiarly rich in this kind 
of literature among English-speaking people, and some 
of the very best modern writing in our language has 
taken this form. When it comes to the question of 
literary quality, there is nothing in letter-writing, from 
the time of Howell down, more admirable than that 
which makes every bit and fragment from Thackeray's 
pen literature. In those estrays, to which he probably 
attached no value, and to which in many cases he 
certainly gave little time or thought, the touch of the 
master is in every line, — that indefinable quality which 
forever differentiates writing from literature. This 



THE LOWELL LETTERS. 8 1 

quality, which is personality plus the artistic power, 
is quite as likely to discover itself in the briefest note 
as in the most elaborate work; indeed, the careless 
ease with which a man often writes to his friend is 
more favourable to free and unconscious expression of 
himself than the essay or the novel over which he 
broods and upon which he works month after month, 
perhaps year after year. The suspicion of toil is fatal 
to a work of art, for the essence of art is ease ; and 
for this reason the letters of some writers are distinctly 
the best things they have given us. Unfortunately, 
even letter-writers do not always escape the temptation 
to write with an eye to the future, and to put one's 
best foot forward, instead of opening one's mind and 
heart without care or consciousness. 

Mr. Lowell's letters are not free from faults, but 
their faults spring from his conditions and temperament, 
and not from proximity to a large and admiring audi- 
ence. The letters are simple, frank, and often charm- 
ingly affectionate ; they reveal the heart of the man, 
and perhaps their best service to us is the impression 
they convey that the man and his work were of a piece, 
and that the fine idealism of the poet was but the ex- 
pression of what was most real and significant to the 
man. The self-consciousness of the young Lowell 
comes out very strongly if one reads his letters in con- 
nection with those of the young Walter Scott ; but it 
was a self-consciousness inherited with the Puritan 
temperament rather than developed in the individual 
nature. The strong, quiet, easy relations of Scott to 
6 



82 MY STUDY FIRE. 

his time and world are very suggestive of a power 
which has so far eluded our grasp, — a power which, 
could we grasp it, would make the production of great 
literature possible to us. Lowell had so many elements 
of greatness that one is often perplexed by the fact 
that, as a writer, with all his gifts, he somehow falls 
short of greatness. May it not be that all that stood 
between Lowell and those final stretches of achieve- 
ment where the great immortal things are done was 
his self-consciousness? He was never quite free; he 
could never quite let himself go, so to speak, and let 
the elemental force sweep him wholly out of himself. 
But it is not probable that any one could have grown 
up in the New England of his boyhood and possessed 
this last gift of greatness. " I shall never be a poet," 
he wrote in 1865, "till I get out of the pulpit; and 
New England was all meeting-house when I was grow- 
ing up." A generation later this unconsciousness had 
become possible, for Phillips Brooks possessed it in 
rare degree ; it was the secret of that contagious 
quality which gave him such compelling power when- 
ever he rose to speak. 

Lowell's letters have the great charm of frankness, — 
a charm possessed only by natures of a high order. 
One is constantly struck with his simplicity, — that 
simplicity which is so often found in a nature at once 
strong and rich. Life consists, after all, in a very few 
things, and no one knows this so well as the man who 
has tried many things. There was in the heart of the 
old diplomatist the same hunger and thirst that were 



THE LOWELL LETTERS. 83 

in the heart of the young poet. Leslie Stephen says 
of him : " He was one of those men of whom it might 
be safely said, not that they were unspoiled by popu- 
larity and flattery, but that it was inconceivable that 
they should be spoiled. He offered no assailable 
point to temptation of that kind. For it is singularly 
true of him, as I take it to be generally true of men 
of the really poetical temperament, that the child in 
him was never suppressed. He retained the most 
transparent simplicity to the end." And this comment 
is delightfully confirmed by an incident reported by 
the " Universal Eavesdropper : " " Passing along the 
Edgware Road with a friend two years ago, their eyes 
were attracted by a sign with this inscription : ' Hos- 
pital for Incurable Children.' Turning to his com- 
panion with that genial smile for which he is remarka- 
ble, Lowell said quietly, ' There 's where they '11 send 
me one of these days.' " He professed not to know 
of what Fountain of Youth he had drank, but he could 
hardly have been ignorant that there was such a 
fountain in his own nature. The " exhaustless fund 
of inexperience " which he said was somewhere about 
him was simply the richness of a nature which never 
reached its limits and flowed back upon itself with that 
silent but desolating reaction which sometimes gives 
age a touch of tragedy. 

The simplicity of Lowell's nature comes out also in 
his dealing with ethical questions. He never sophisti- 
cates, or perplexes himself or his readers with the 
effort to justify the right and just thing by a train of 



84 MY STUDY FIRE. 

reasoning ; he strikes straight at the heart of the mat- 
ter. Nothing seems to confuse him or to distort his 
vision ; he sees clearly, and what he sees he accepts 
with childlike simplicity of faith. This is the secret 
of his singular effectiveness when he speaks on moral 
questions. There is an elemental Tightness in his 
view and an elemental authority in his voice. Whether 
he is dealing with the burning question of slavery, or 
with the delusion of spiritualism, or with incorrupti- 
bility in public life, or with honest payment of public 
obligations, or with the right of property in books, 
his perception flies like an arrow to its mark ; tradition, 
custom, casuistry, not only do not confuse him — they 
do not even reach him. This quality of directness is 
one of the most convincing evidences of greatness. 
In a man of Lincoln's opportunities and experiences 
its presence is not surprising, although none the less 
admirable and rare ; but in a man of Lowell's culture 
and wide contact with life it shines with a beauty made 
more effective by the richness of the medium which it 
masters. 

" I love above all other reading the early letters of 
men of genius. In that struggling, hoping, confident 
time, the world has not slipped in with its odious con- 
sciousness, its vulgar claim of confidantship between 
them and their inspiration. In reading these letters I 
can recall my former self, full of an aspiration which 
had not learned how hard the hills of life are to climb, 
but thought rather to alight upon them from its winged 
vantage-ground." These words, called out by a gift 



THE LOWELL LETTERS. 85 

of rt Keats's Life," are expressive of the feeling with 
which one dips into these letters written by the same 
hand, — letters full of disclosures of character ; of side- 
lights on a life of sustained dignity and fruitfulness ; 
of wit, humor, wisdom, and art. 



THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 

Mr. Lowell speaks of himself, in one of his most 
characteristic letters, as one of the last of the great 
readers, — a fortunate few who have had leisure and 
opportunity to stray at will through the whole field of 
literature. The true book-lover counts his easy inti- 
macy with his library as a privilege beyond the pur- 
chasing power of money or fame, and would sooner 
part with all hope of share in either than with a 
resource which is a measureless delight. For the love 
of books becomes a passion in the end, and when the 
heart once falls a prey to this passion, most things 
that other men care for become dross. Great fortunes 
do not so much as touch the imagination that has kept 
company with Una and Rosalind; and the fret and 
fever of the rush for place have no power to mar the 
repose of the library in which the devout reader sits as 
in a shrine. To those who have become past-masters 
of the art of reading, the spell of the book is not to be 
resisted ; but no description can convey an idea of its 
power to those who have not fallen under it. The 
real reader believes in his heart that every hour apart 
from his books is an hour lost ; that all duties and 
necessities which draw him away are not only inter- 



THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 87 

ruptions, but impertinences ; and that the busy, rest- 
less, distracted world has no more right to disturb him 
in his devotions than had the marauding bands of 
mediaeval warfare to break in upon the fugitives who 
had taken refuge in the sanctuaries. This is what the 
past-master of the art of reading believes in his heart ; 
but he has kept good company too long to exalt his 
privilege at the expense of his fellows by making public 
confession of his faith. 

We often need, however, to protect ourselves from 
our friends ; for we cannot bring the best gifts to the 
service of friendship unless we guard the independence 
of our own thought and action against even the solici- 
tation of affection. Lovelace struck a very deep note 
when he sang : — 

"I could not love thee, Dear, so much 
Loved I not Honour more." 

A great affection is often a great peril, and a great 
passion brings with it a commensurate danger. The 
great reader is the most fortunate of men, but he is 
also one of the most sorely tempted ; and his temp- 
tation is the more seductive because it comes in the 
guise of an opportunity. It seems a great waste of 
time, and a piece of very bad taste as well, to spend 
much time with one's own thought when the best 
thought of the world may be had for the opening of 
a volume close at hand. There is a kind of brazen 
effrontery in trying to think things out for ourselves 
when Plato's Dialogues let us into a world of thought 



88 MY STUDY FIRE. 

not only very noble in its structure, but enchanting in 
its atmosphere. In the long run, however, one would 
better do without Plato than lose the habit of thinking. 
And how shall a man justify serious and prolonged 
observation of life when the plays of Shakespeare lie 
on his table, to be opened in any hour, and never to 
be closed without a fresh sense of the marvellous 
searching of the heart and mind of man which has 
made its registry on every page? No reader ever 
gets to the bottom of Shakespeare's thought, and surely 
it is folly to try to master life for ourselves when we 
are unable to fully possess ourselves of this interpreta- 
tion of it ! In like manner, Theocritus and Words- 
worth and Burns make our efforts to establish personal 
relations with nature seem at once intrusive and ridic- 
ulous. Whichever way we turn we are confronted by 
our betters, and the sensitive spirit feels abashed and 
appalled in the presence of the masters who have 
possessed themselves in advance of every field which 
he wishes to explore. The great reader, with so much 
unappropriated material at hand, is tempted to become 
a mere receptacle for knowledge or a mere taster of 
the vintages of past years. 

A good deal of originative force is absorbed in 
enjoyment in the library, and many a man who might 
have seen and said things for himself sees them only 
through the eyes of others and says them only in their 
language. Activity, it is true, is often only a mis- 
chievous form of idleness, and it would be better if 
some men were content to enjoy instead of striving to 



THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 89 

create ; much current writing brings this truth home 
to us. Nevertheless, a man would better be himself 
in a poor way than be somebody else in a very rich 
way. The modest house which a man builds for him- 
self, with his own brains and hands, is more creditable 
to him than the great house which he occupies by the 
grace or good-will of another. A man owes it to him- 
self to stand in personal relations with life, and not to 
touch it at second hand ; and one would better see it 
for himself than get report of it from the keenest 
observer that ever studied it ; one would better scrape 
acquaintance with nature on any terms than get his 
knowledge of her at second hand. The chief thing 
for every man is to come into actual contact with the 
things that make for his life ; and for that contact no 
price is too great, — not even the price of turning the 
key in the library door and suffering the cobwebs to 
cloud the titles of the books. The bookworm has an 
enjoyment so keen that we must envy even while we 
condemn it. But the pleasure costs too much. It 
costs that which no man has a right to pay. 

It involves, among other losses, a diminution of the 
power of appreciation and appropriation ; for the man 
who is always and only a reader fails to get the last 
flavour out of his pursuit. There is not only a great 
freshening of the receptive sense by variation of occu- 
pation and experience, but there is also notable gain 
in insight by supplementing the observation of others 
with studies of our own. No man can fully enter into 
the Shakespearean comment upon life until he has first 



90 MY STUDY FIRE. 

learned something of life at his own charges ; and no 
man can feel the ultimate charm of Wordsworth and 
Burns who has not first plucked the daifodil and the 
daisy with his own hands. The men of many books 
are often impoverished so far as real wealth of thought, 
knowledge, and feeling is concerned, and the men of 
few books are often incalculably rich in these posses- 
sions. Burton loved his books well and not unwisely, 
but we read his pages of compacted quotation only at 
intervals and with great temperance ; while of Shake- 
speare, the man of few books, and those few mainly 
translations, we can never get enough. It is true that 
there has been but one Shakespeare, and in any age 
the men are few who have any original comments to 
make. If life were chiefly a matter of expression, it 
would be better every way that a few should speak and 
that the rest of us should keep silence in the presence 
of our betters ; but expression is the gift of the few, 
while experience, and the growth which comes through 
it, is a birthright which no man can sell without selling 
himself. Whether silent or speaking, a man must be 
himself, see with his own eyes, and work with his own 
hands. The crowd of glorious witnesses who look 
down upon his toil from the shelves of his library will 
not despise it because it is humble, nor will they scorn 
his achievement because it is meagre and imperfect. 
Their noblest service is to give us faith in ourselves 
and joy in our work. 



THE SPELL OF STYLE. 

The reality of art is constantly affirmed by the sud- 
den flaming of the imagination and the swift response 
of the emotions to its silent appeal. Whenever a real 
sentence is spoken on the stage, what a silence falls on 
the theatre ! Something has gone home to every audi- 
tor, and the hush of recognition or expectancy is in- 
stantaneous. There is, perhaps, no scene in the modern 
lyrical drama which is more beautiful in its suggestive- 
ness than that in which Siegfried strives to comprehend 
the song of the birds, and vainly shapes his stubborn 
reed to give them note for note. The light sifts down 
through the trees ; the leaves sway gently in the cur- 
rents of air, rising and falling as if touched by the ebb 
and flow of invisible tides ; the sound of running 
water, cool, pellucid, unstained by human association, 
steals in among the murmurous tones ; and in the 
midst of this mysterious stir of life sits Siegfried, pa- 
thetically eager to catch the keynote of a harmony 
whose existence he feels, but the significance of which 
escapes him. The baffling sense of a music just be- 
yond our hearing continually besets us, and, like Sieg- 
fried, we are forever striving to master this mysterious 
melody. 



92 MY STUDY FIRE. 

There is in all artistic natures a conviction that a 
deep and universal accord exists between all created 
things, and that beyond all apparent discords there is 
an eternal harmony. This fundamental unity philoso- 
phy is always searching for and art is always finding, 
and the thrill which runs through us when a perfect 
phrase falls on our ears, or a new glimpse of beauty 
passes before our eyes, is something more than the 
joy of the aesthetic sense ; it is the joy of the soul in a 
new disclosure of life itself. There is a deep mystery 
in this matter of harmony and of its power over us : 
the mystery which hides the soul of life and art. If 
we could penetrate that mystery we should master the 
secret of existence, and find truth and beauty, life and 
its final expression, so blended and fused that we could 
no more separate them than we can separate the form, 
the colour, and the fragrance of the flower ; for they 
have one root, and are but different manifestations of 
the same vital force. 

The psychologists tell us that every man has a 
rhythm discoverable in his walk, gesture, voice, modu- 
lation, and sentences ; a rhythm which is the natural 
expression of the man when all the elements of his 
nature come into harmony, and the inner and outward, 
the spiritual and the physical, flow together in perfect 
unison. At rare intervals such a man throws his spell 
over us with written or spoken words, and we are 
drawn out of ourselves and borne along by a music of 
speech which touches the senses as delicately and 
surely as it touches the soul. Such a nature has passed 



THE SPELL OF STYLE. 93 

beyond the secondary processes of the intellect into 
the region of ultimate truth, and speaks, not with the 
divisive tongue of the Scribe, but with the authority of 
Nature herself. For the power of the masters is a 
mystery even to themselves ; it is a power so largely 
unconscious that the deepest knowledge its possessor 
has of it ,is the knowledge that at times he can com- 
mand it, and at other times it eludes him. 

" I know very well," says Lowell, " what the charm 
of mere words is. I know very well that our nerves 
of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the vio- 
lin is said to do, to certain modulations, so that we 
receive them with a readier sympathy at every repeti- 
tion. This is a part of the sweet charm of the classics." 
It is a part, indeed, but only a part ; the spell is deeper 
and more lasting, for it is the spell which the vision of 
the whole has for him who has seen only a part ; which 
a sudden glimpse of the eternal has for him whose 
sight rests on the temporal ; which a disclosure of per- 
fection has for him who lives and strives in a world of 
fragments. The tones of the violin get their resonance 
and fulness from the entire instrument, — from the 
body no less than from the strings ; and the magical 
melody which a Paganini evokes from it is the har- 
mony of a perfected violin. In like manner the magi- 
cal spell lies within the empire of that man alone 
whose whole being has found its keynote and natural 
rhythm. 

This lets us into the secret of style, — that elusive 
quality which forever separates the work of the artist 



94 MY STUDY FIRE. 

from that of the artisan. For the final form which a 
great thought or a great emotion takes on is as far 
removed from accident, caprice, or choice as are the 
shape and colour of the flower ; it was ordained before 
the foundations of the world, by the hand which made 
all life of a piece and decreed that the great things 
should grow by an interior law, instead of being fash- 
ioned by mechanical skill. Body, mind, and spirit are 
so blended in every work of art that they are not only 
inseparable, but form a living whole. Not only is the 
Kalevala, in idea, imagery, and words, a creation out 
of the soul of the race that fashioned it, but its metre 
was determined by the actual heart-beat and respiratory 
action of the men who, age after age, recited it from 
memory. Every original metre and all rhythm have 
their roots in the rhythmical action of the body ; lan- 
guage, arrangement, and selection, in the rhythmical 
action of the mind ; and emotion and passion, in the 
currents of the soul : so that every real poem is a 
growth of the entire life of a man ; and the spell of its 
deep harmony of parts, as well as its melody of words, 
is compounded of his very substance. 

This spell, which issues from all art, resides in no 
verbal sleight of hand, no tricks with phrases : it is a 
sudden flashing out of the perfection at the heart of 
things ; and we are thrilled by it because in it we rec- 
ognise what is deepest and divinest in our own natures. 
If this spell were at the command of any kind of dex- 
terity, it would be sought and gained by a host of 
mechanical experts ; but it is the despair of the dex- 



THE SPELL OF STYLE. 95 

terous and the strenuous : it is as elusive as the wind, 
and as completely beyond human control. Nothing is 
more certain than that Shakespeare has a style; he 
has a way of saying things so entirely his own that one 
is never at a loss to identify his phrase in any com- 
pany ; indeed, it is not too much to say that if some 
stray line of his were to come to light, with no formal 
trace of authorship about it, the great poet would not 
be despoiled of his own for an hour. And yet no one 
has ever imitated Shakespeare ! The Shakespearean 
idiom is absolutely incommunicable. The secondary 
work of Milton has often been copied , — it is, indeed, 
easily imitated, for it is full of mannerisms ; but Shakes- 
peare, in the processes of his spell-weaving, is no more 
to be overtaken than is the tide of life silently rising 
into leaf and flower. At his best, Shakespeare is magi- 
cal ; he is beyond analysis or imitation ; he has come 
into such touch with nature that the inner harmony, 
the ultimate music, becomes audible through him. 
When the real significance of style dawns upon us, it is 
not difficult to understand the spell which resides in 
this perfection of phrase, nor the eagerness with which 
men pursue it. The true artist lives in the constant 
anticipation of seeing life as it is, and putting the 
vision into words that bring with them the power and 
harmony of that tremendous revelation. 



THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 

In the earlier days of the literary art, when life and 
its expression in speech were in closest relation, voice, 
gesture, and personality, revealed in face and bearing, 
were as much a part of literature as language itself. 
The Greek choral dance, which Mr. Moulton aptly 
calls "literary protoplasm," was the expression of the 
soul through all the forms at its command, — words, 
song, gesture, movement. The balladist and, later, the 
bard gave their recitations or chanting monologues an 
effective accompaniment of intonation, accent, empha- 
sis, and gesture ; and the result was, in some cases, 
literature, which was something more than words set in 
beautiful or impressive order. 

In like manner, there has always been an oratory 
which was something more than spoken thought, 
which has had all the elements of art, and has been, 
therefore, to the men who came under its spell, spoken 
literature. The great mass of speaking is, necessarily, 
for the moment only ; it has an immediate object ; it 
is addressed to a special audience ; it finds its inspira- 
tion in an occasion. Such speaking is often forcible, 
witty, eloquent, and effective ; but it is not literature. 
It is distinctly ephemeral, and, having accomplished 
its purpose, it is forgotten, like all other tools and 



THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 97 

implements of construction. The oratory which is 
literature, on the other hand, touches great themes, 
allies itself with beauty or majesty of form, and, 
although addressed to an immediate and visible audi- 
ence, makes its final appeal to that unseen but innu- 
merable company who, in succeeding ages, gather 
silently about the great artists and are charmed and 
inspired by these unforgotten masters. 

To this company of orators who made speech litera- 
ture by dignity of theme, breadth of view, beauty of 
form, and harmony of delivery, George William Curtis 
belonged. He was not the greatest of those who, in 
this New World, have used the platform as a vantage- 
ground of leadership. He had not the organ-tones of 
Webster, nor the incisive style and matchless vocal 
skill of Phillips, nor the compass of Beecher ; but in 
that fine harmony of theme, treatment, style, and per- 
sonality which make the speech literature, he surpassed 
them all. Less effective for the moment than Phillips, 
his art has a finer fibre and a more enduring charm. 
When he spoke, it seemed as if one were present at 
the creation of a piece of literature. He saw his 
theme in such large relations, he touched it with a 
hand so true and so delicate, he phrased his thought 
with such lucid and winning refinement and skill, his 
bearing, enunciation, voice, and gesture were so har- 
monious, that what he said and his manner of saying 
it seemed all of a piece, and the product was a beauti- 
ful bit of art, — something incapable of entire preserva- 
tion, and yet possessing the quality of the things that 
7 



98 MY STUDY FIRE. 

endure. The enchantments of speech were his beyond 
any man of his generation, and he gave them a grace 
of manner which deepened and expanded their charm. 
Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Mr. Curtis's 
oratory was its harmony. There were no dissonances 
in it ; there was none of that falling apart of thought 
and expression which so constantly mars the charm of 
public address. Thought, language, voice, and ges- 
ture flowed together, and ran at times like a shining 
stream, rippling into humour, breaking into musical 
cadences, but sweeping on with continuous and 
unbroken flow. Such speech was literature in a very 
high sense, because it was essentially art, — native force, 
a trained personality, and a sure and varied craftsman- 
ship combining in a result which obliterated all trace 
of processes, and existed only as a complete expression 
of a high and noble nature. For there was no disso- 
nance between Mr. Curtis's aims and spirit and his 
oratory. The fatal fluency which makes a man the 
characterless reflection of the mood and moment was 
utterly alien to him ; he was free from that beguiling 
immorality to which so many men of easy speech fall 
a prey, — the immorality of high-flying rhetoric and 
low-flying thought and aim. He held himself above 
his gift, and turned all its possibilities of temptation 
into sources of power and influence. For he spoke 
out of a deep sincerity, and with a steadfastness of 
purpose which made his long public life one long 
integrity. There was a great personal peril in an 
optimism so persistently avowed, in an ideal of life so 



THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 99 

steadily held aloft in speech as splendid as itself, — the 
peril of making the speaker's life meagre and dwarfed 
in contrast with the richness and beauty of his art. 
But Mr. Curtis's life and his art were of a piece ; and, 
while his judgment was not free from the errors which 
beset all human judgment, no man can point to any 
severance between the image of life which he revealed 
to the souls of countless young men and the life he 
lived with tireless industry and unflagging energy to the 
day of his death. 

The harmony which characterised his addresses was 
significant of the artistic quality which he possessed in 
very rare degree. It is true that his life ran very 
largely in ethical channels, and that he used the plat- 
form especially to influence the wills of his auditors 
and to inspire them to definite courses of action ; but 
even in dealing with moral questions he was pre- 
eminently an artist. Right thought and right action 
seemed to him essential to harmonious living ; and he 
was moved not so much by the wrong against which 
he spoke as by the ideal of symmetrical life which its 
very existence violated and jeopardised. He was long 
in the very thick of the bitterest controversy of the 
century, but there was always a finer note than that of 
antagonism in his pleas and arguments ; he touched 
the great chords of justice, freedom, and brotherhood. 
A reformer of a radical type, he always rose out of the 
atmosphere of agitation ; it was not destruction which 
he sought, — it was the demolition of the false construc- 
tion, in order that the noble lines of the true structure 



IOO MY STUDY FIRE. 

might become as clear to others as they were to him. 
Whether he pleaded for the emancipation of the slave 
or the removal of the last vestige of restriction on the 
private and public action of women, he spoke always 
as one before whose eyes a great vision of the future 
shines, and in whose soul that vision has become an 
article of faith. It was completeness and harmony of 
life which he sought ; and while his ethical sense had a 
Puritan keenness and authority, it had also the wider 
vision and the broader relationships of one who sees 
life as a whole, and who sees it as a great harmony, 
whose final and eternal expression is beauty. 

Art is so precious, and, in these later days, so rare 
and so difficult of possession, that it is hard to recon- 
cile one's self to the disappearance of such an artist as 
Mr. Curtis. For, while the words which he spoke 
remain, the charm, the delicacy, the spell, can never 
be recalled ; they are a part of that spoken literature 
which has often calmed or stirred the hearts of men, 
but which perishes even in the moment of its flowering. 
And yet, in a deep sense, all art is imperishable ; for 
the goal of ultimate excellence can never be touched 
in any generation without imparting that deep and 
noble delight which is the swift recognition by every 
soul of its own ideals. When art comes back to us 
once more, in some riper and sweeter time, perhaps 
we shall care more for the delight of its birth than for 
its power to persist. When the streams run with 
brimming current, we are indifferent to the reservoirs ; 
our joy is not in the volume of water, but in the sweep 
and rush of the living tide. 



A POET OF ASPIRATION. 



There are few names in this century which have 
had, for young men especially, greater attractive power 
than that of Arthur Hugh Clough. This power has 
never been widely, but in many cases it has been 
deeply, felt. It has its source more in the nature of 
the man and in the conditions of his life than in his 
work, although the latter is full of the elevation, the 
aspiration, and the beauty of a very noble mind. But 
it is not as a finished artist, as a singer whose message 
is clear and whose note is resonant, that Clough 
attracts ; it is rather as a child of his time, as one in 
whom the stir and change of the century were most 
distinctly reflected. There was an intense sympathy 
with his age in the heart of Clough, a sensitiveness to 
the tidal influences of thought and emotion, which 
made his impressionable nature, for a time at least, a 
prey to agitation and turmoil ; and there is no more 
delicate registry of the tempestuous weather of the 
second quarter of the century than that which is found 
in his work. 

It was in November, 1836, that Clough, a boy of 
seventeen, exchanged school life at Rugby for college 



102 MY STUDY FIRE. 

life at Oxford. He had always been in advance of his 
opportunities ; he had led each form successively ; he 
was the best swimmer and the first runner in the 
school ; he was so manly, genuine, and wholly lovable 
that when he left for Oxford every boy in the school 
waited to shake hands with him ; his scholarly prom- 
inence was so marked that in his last year Dr. Arnold 
broke the silence which he invariably had preserved in 
awarding prizes, and publicly congratulated him on 
having secured every prize and won every honour which 
Rugby offered, and crowned his achievements by gain- 
v ing the Balliol scholarship, then and now the highest 
honor open to the English school-boy. With such a 
record of fidelity and ability behind him, Clough en- 
tered upon his career at Oxford. He had not won the 
heart and enjoyed the teaching of Arnold without 
some comprehension of the largeness of thought and 
the noble intellectual sympathy which made his master 
the ideal teacher of his time; his mind was already 
playing, with a boy's eager and buoyant expectancy, 
about the problems of the age. He had learned 
already that loyalty to truth, whatever it costs and 
wherever it leads, is the only basis of a life of intel- 
lectual integrity. At Rugby he left one of the largest, 
freest, and most progressive minds of a generation rich 
in men of commanding ability ; at Oxford he met 
those persuasive, subtle, and eloquent teachers who 
were to lead the greatest reactionary movement of the 
time. John Henry Newman, luminous in thought, 
fervent in spirit, winning in speech, was steadily draw- 



A POET OF ASPIRATION. 103 

ing away from modern life to the repose and authority 
of the Middle Ages. The very air throbbed with the 
stir of a conflict which drew all sensitive minds within 
the circle of its agitation, and the eager expectancy 
which filled the hearts of the leaders seemed to prom- 
ise a new day of spiritual impulse and ecclesiastical 
splendour. Then, if ever, was realised that beautiful 
vision of Oxford which Dr. Arnold's son has given to 
the world, when she lay " spreading her gardens to the 
moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last 
enchantments of the middle age." 

Clough, in the fulness of his early intellectual 
awakening, had already passed beyond the spell even 
of an enchantment so alluring and magical as that 
which Newman's eloquence was throwing around many 
an eager spirit ; he had gone too far on the road to a 
free and noble mental life ever to turn back and sit 
once more in the shadows that fell from cathedral 
towers, and leave to others the guidance and direction 
of his thought. But no young man could live in that 
seething vortex and not be driven hither and thither 
by the mere force of the currents of thought ; for two 
years, he says, " I was like a straw drawn up the 
draught of a chimney." He had passed from the 
influence of one of the freest to the influence of one 
the most reactionary minds of the day, and the tumult 
of conflicting opinion compelled him to examine and 
re-examine questions the consideration of which be- 
longs to maturer years. Amid the conflict which went 
on about and within him, he carried himself with such 



104 MY STUDY FIRE. 

a steady resolution and with such a calmness of faith 
in the victory of truth that among his contemporaries 
he was soon felt as an independent force, preserving 
amid the agitation the quietude of soul which is the 
possession of the true thinker. Clough was not long 
overwhelmed and tossed helplessly from one side to 
the other of the whirling vortex of discussion ; he was 
stimulated by the agitation into larger and freer play 
of mind upon the great questions of life, and he was 
filled — as an open mind cannot but be filled when all 
the elements are in motion — with the hope of a 
nobler world of faith some day to roll out of the cloud 
and darkness. In this eager expectancy, this pure and 
breathless aspiration, he may well stand in our thought 
for a whole group of men upon whom the questioning 
of this century has come, not to paralyse, but to inspire. 
Let him speak for himself : — 

" 'T is but the cloudy darkness dense ; 

Though blank the tale it tells, 
No God, no Truth ! yet He, in sooth, 

Within the sceptic darkness deep 
He dwells that none may see, 

Till idol forms and idol thoughts 
Have passed and ceased to be : 

No God, no Truth ! ah, though, in sooth, 
So stand the doctrine's half ; 

On Egypt's track return not back, 
Nor own the Golden Calf. 

" Take better part, with manlier heart, 
Thine adult spirit can ; 
No God, no Truth ! receive it ne'er — 
Believe it ne'er — O man ! 



A POET OF ASPIRATION. 105 

No God, it saith ; ah, wait in faith 

God's self-completing plan ; 
Receive it not, but leave it not, 

And wait it out, O man 1 " 

Defective as poetry, these verses express, neverthe- 
less, the spirit and attitude of a free, religious nature, 
and they have the charm of Clough's habitual veracity. 
And where shall we find a truer expression of the 
feeling which lies deepest in the heart of this century 
than that contained in these striking verses : — 

" Go from the East to the West, as the sun and the stars direct 
thee, 
Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass the earth. 
Not for the gain of the gold — for the getting, the hoarding, 

the having, 
But for the joy of the deed ; but for the Duty to do. 
Go with the spiritual life, the higher volition and action, 
With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth. 

" Go ; say not in thy heart And what then were it accom- 
plished, 

Were the wild impulse allayed, what were the use or the 
good ! 

Go, when the instinct is stilled, and when the deed is accom- 
plished, 

What thou hast done and shalt do shall be declared to thee 
then. 

Go with the sun and the stars, and yet evermore in thy spirit 

Say to thyself : It is good ; yet is there better than it. 

This that I see is not all, and this that I do is but little ; 

Nevertheless it is good, though there is better than it." 

It is the spirit of youth which breathes in these 
impressive lines and gives them a tonic quality. At a 



106 MY STUDY FIRE. 

time when so much diseased and cowardly thought 
finds its record in verse, it seems almost a duty to 
recall the large and hopeful utterance of a sane and 
healthy nature, in full sympathy with the time, and 
often in genuine anguish of spirit because of it, and 
yet serene and aspiring to the very end. 



THE READING PUBLIC. 

Mr. Howells, who is not only a prolific and suc- 
cessful writer, but a faithful custodian of the dignity of 
his craft, has recently said that publishers have their 
little superstitions and their " blind faith in the great 
god Chance." This worship of the uncertain deity is 
perhaps explained by the statement that — 

"a book sells itself, or does not sell at all. . . . With 
the best or the worst will in the world, no publisher can 
force a book into acceptance. Advertising will not avail, 
and reviewing is notoriously futile. If the book does not 
strike the popular fancy, or deal with some universal in- 
terest, which, need by no means be a profound or impor- 
tant one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in 
vain. The book may be one of the best and wisest books 
in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it, the 
readers of it, and worse yet, the purchasers, will remain 
few, though fit. The secret of this, like most other se- 
crets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping 
of fate, and we can hope to surprise it only by some lucky 
chance." 

These are the words of a man who, by virtue of the 
quality of his work and the long-continued and close 
relations he has maintained with what is popularly 



108 MY STUDY FIRE. 

called the reading public in this country, has every 
right to claim attention when he speaks on such a 
subject. The publisher of largest experience is, as a 
rule, freest to confess his inability to predict in ad- 
vance the fate of a book by a new author, or, for that 
matter, the fate of any particular book ; and this fact 
seems to prove that there is in the business of offering 
literary work to the public a large element of what, for 
lack of a better name, the publisher calls luck or 
chance. 

And yet the mind rebels against the presence of 
so unintelligent a factor as chance in the relation of 
readers to literature ; for literature is not only the 
greatest of arts, but stands in most intimate relations 
with those who come under its influence, and there is 
a certain profanation in the determination of such a 
relation by the accident of a manner which fits the 
mood of the moment, or of a style which captures the 
wayward or idle fancy of the passing crowd. The 
mind revolts against chance as a determining factor in 
any field, but the persistency of its revolt in this par- 
ticular field is evidenced by the constantly repeated 
effort to secure trustworthy data regarding the relative 
popularity of books. These efforts assume that there 
are principles of taste or conditions of culture deter- 
mining the choice of books, which may be discovered 
if the data can be collected. Such attempts to ascer- 
tain the tastes of the reading public are often, no 
doubt, stimulated by curiosity ; but the subject is one 
of prime importance, not only to the writer and the 



THE READING PUBLIC. IOg 

publisher, but to the community at large ; since there 
is no more decisive test of intelligence than the quality 
and character of the books most widely read. 

In this country one great difficulty in dealing with 
the matter lies in the fact that there are, not one, but 
many, reading publics which are mutually exclusive of 
one another \ for the public that concerns itself with 
Dante and Goethe, for instance, is not only indifferent 
to the productions of the cheap novelist, but is in 
blissful ignorance of the depressing fact that her pro- 
ductions are sold by the thousand at the news-stands. 
A homogeneous reading public does not exist, at this 
moment, in this country, although there is good reason 
to believe that we are on the way to form such a com- 
munity. It may be that we shall not produce our 
greatest books until we have first secured, not only the 
possibility of a wide and representative appreciation of 
them, but that pressure for expression of deep and 
universal emotion and thought which fairly forces great 
books into being. The closest relation between the 
writer and the public which has ever existed produced, 
or at least recognised at the first glance, the most per- 
fect literature the world has yet known. The Athenian 
writer of the great period was so intimate with his 
audience that his constant appeal was not to his own 
consciousness, but to theirs \ and to every allusion in 
the play, the dramatist knew that the whole city, assem- 
bled about the stage, would instantly respond. Inac- 
curacy, false sentiment, or defective art could not 
survive the ordeal of a presentation so close and a 



1 10 MY STUDY FIRE. 

hearing at once so swiftly appreciative and so relent- 
lessly critical. The Athenian audience did not read, 
it listened ; and to the sensitive imagination of the 
writer there must have been a compelling power in the 
silent urgence of a craving for race-expression at once 
so intense and so exacting. Such an appeal could 
have come only from a constituency united by homo- 
geneous ideas, traditions, and intelligence. The chief 
value of this fact for us lies in the illustration which it 
offers of the normal, that is to say the highest, relation 
between writers and readers. 

Among English-speaking people the existence of a 
reading public — a body of readers, that is, representa- 
tive of all classes — does not date farther back than the 
time of De Foe, whose " True-Born Englishman " was 
one of the first pieces of writing in our language to 
secure, by reason of its timely interest and its charac- 
teristic vigour, a national reading. The people who, a 
little later, found delight in the society of " The Spec- 
tator " were no small company, but they must have 
been, from the nature of those charming chapters of 
Addisonian comment and chronicle, a homogeneous 
group, sharing a certain degree of social opportunity 
and general culture. And this statement holds true of 
the constituency of the greater part of the writers of 
the last century, who, despite many differences of 
talent and method, held certain literary traditions in 
common, and rarely strayed beyond the horizon of the 
small world of cultivated people. 

In this century, however, writers have come to deal 



THE READING PUBLIC. Ill 

in the most direct and uncompromising manner with 
every form of human experience ; while, at the same 
time, the wide diffusion of elementary education and 
the ease with which books of every kind are set up, 
printed, bound, and offered for sale, have formed a 
large reading public without intellectual training, and 
have supplied this public with a mass of books devoid 
of all literary quality, and having nothing in common 
with literature save the outward aspect of page, type, 
and cover. The knowledge of good and evil in art, 
which can hardly be said to have come to the Athenian, 
so uniformly high was the quality of the work offered 
him, is possessed in fullest measure by the reading 
publics of to-day ; and it is this very fact which gives 
their choice of books its significance. For there is to- 
day, for the first time, entire freedom of choice ; there 
have been worthless books before, but they were never 
so numerous, so accessible, and so low in price as dur- 
ing the last twenty-five years. They are thrust upon 
us at every turn, at prices which bring them within 
reach of the meditative bootblack. When it was diffi- 
cult to find publishers for worthless books, and neces- 
sary to sell them at prices which put them on the top 
shelf so far as the poorer people were concerned, there 
was, naturally, a very small publication of such books, 
and a still smaller constituency for them. It is well to 
remember, therefore, that the old audience of cultivated 
readers has not ceased to exist, — there is every reason 
to believe that it constantly grows larger, — but it is 
swallowed up in a vast assemblage of readers gathered 



112 MY STUDY FIRE. 

from all classes in the community, and furnished with a 
practically unlimited supply of reading-matter of every 
kind. If our sins are more numerous than the sins of 
our fathers, let us do ourselves the justice to remem- 
ber that our temptations are multiplied many fold; 
and that while they had to seek evil and pay for 
it, we must strive in all public conveyances to keep it 
out of our hands, at a price which, under the delusion 
of getting something for nothing, becomes a new 
temptation. 



SANITY AND ART. 

In reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, 
one is constantly impressed not only with the range 
and power of these great artists, but with their sanity 
and health. Their supreme authority in the realm of 
art resides as much in their clearness of vision as in 
/ their artistic quality ; they were essentially sound and 
\ wholesome natures. They had the fresh perception, 
the true vision, the self-control, of health. The world 
was not distorted or overshadowed to them ; they saw 
it as it was, and they reported it as they saw it. Health 
is, indeed, one of the great qualities of the highest 
art, because veracity of mind and of emotion depends 
largely upon health, and veracity lies at the base of all 
enduring art. To the reader of contemporary books 
Homer is the greatest of antiseptics ; after so many 
records of diseased minds, so many confessions of 
morbid souls, the " Odyssey " is a whiff of air from the 
sea, borne into the suffocating midsummer atmosphere 
of a city street. To exchange Marie Bashkirtseffs 
" Journal " for the great epic of the sea is like coming 
out of some vaporous tropical swamp into the sweep 
of the ocean currents, free airs blowing from every 
quarter, and the whole stretch of sky visible from 
8 



1 1 4 MY S TUD Y FIfiE. 

horizon to horizon. Mr. Higginson has somewhere 
told the story of an English scholar who gave his 
entire time to Homer, reading the " Iliad " three or 
four times every winter, and the " Odyssey " as many 
times every summer. There might be a certain con- 
traction of interests in such a life, but there could 
hardly be any disease. 

/" Vitality, the power to live deeply and richly, is per- 
| haps the surest evidence of greatness ; to be great, one 
must have compass and range of life. The glorious 
fulness of strength which prompts a man not to skirt 
the shore of the sea of experience, but to plunge into 
its depths, has something divine in it ; it confirms our 
latent faith in the high origin and destiny of humanity. 
The ascetic saints, about whose pale brows the mediae- 
val imagination saw the halo slowly form, were noble 
in self-sacrifice and heroic purity ; but there will come 
a higher type of goodness, — the goodness which tri- 
-umphs by inclusion, not by exclusion; by mastering 
and directing the physical impulses, the primitive 
forces, not by denying them. For the highest spiritual 
achievement is not for those who shun life, but for 
those who share it, and the sublimest victory is to him 
who meets all foes in the open field. 

The first tumultuous outburst of vitality, often very 
unconventional in its manifestations, is not to be con- 
fused with vice, which is always and everywhere a 
kind of disease. " We are somewhat mad here, and 
play the devil's own game," wrote Goethe to Merck 
during that first wild winter at Weimar, when Wieland 



SANITY AND ART. 115 

could find no epithet but wiithig to describe him, and 
the good Klopstock wrote his famous letter of expostu- 
lation and warning, and received his still more famous 
and stinging reply. No doubt the strong currents of 
life overflowed the normal barriers in those gay months 
when the Ilm blazed with torches at night and the 
masked skaters swept past to the strains of music, the 
Poet and his Duke leading the riot. But it was a 
festival of youth far more than an outbreak of vice, 
as the sternest censors soon saw"; and in that splendid 
vitality there was the prophecy of eighty-four years of 
unhasting and unresting energy. 

The early letters of Scott have a delightful freshness 
and buoyancy born of the man's soundness of nature, — 
a soundness which was untouched by the mistakes and 
misfortunes of his later life ; and the perennial charm 
of the Waverley Novels resides very largely in their 
healthfulness. They take us entirely out of ourselves, 
and absorb us in the world of incident and action. If 
they are not always great as works of art, they are 
always great in that health of mind and soul which is 
elemental in all true living. Men cannot be too grate- 
ful for a mass of writing so genuine in tone, so free 
from morbid tendencies, so true to the fundamental 
ethics of living. 

Disease is essentially repulsive to all healthy natures ; 
it is abnormal, and, although pathetically common, 
it is in a sense unnatural. It seems like a violation of 
the natural order ; and, in the long run it is, since it 
finds its cause or opportunity in the violation of some 



Il6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

law of life. We never accustom ourselves to it, and 
we never cease to resent it as the intrusion of a foreign 
element into the normal development of life, and an 
interference with the free play of its forces. And 
our instinct is sound : disease is unnatural ; it is a 
deflection from the normal line and order. Its victim 
is, for that reason, incompetent to report the facts of 
life correctly, or to reach trustworthy conclusions in 
regard to it. 

Because it is a deflection from the line of health 
and a departure from the normal order, disease has 
rightly a deep and painful interest ; it throws light on 
the conditions upon which health rests ; but no physi- 
cian studies disease to discover the normal action of 
the organs. And yet this is precisely what we have 
been doing during the last two centuries ; for we have 
accepted in very large measure the conclusions of dis- 
eased natures regarding the significance, the character, 
and the value of life. We have suffered men of dis- 
eased minds to be our teachers, and, instead of looking 
up into the clear skies, or seeking the altitudes of the 
hills, or finding fellowship with strong, natural men in 
the normal vocations, we have waited in hospitals, and 
listened eagerly to the testimony of sick men touching 
matters about which they were incompetent to speak. 
We have suffered ourselves to become the victims of 
other men's morbid tendencies and distorted vision. 

The men and women whose judgment of the nature 
and value of life has any authority are few ; for the 
phenomena of life are manifold, and most men and 



SANITY AND ART. 117 

women have neither the mental grasp, nor the range 
of knowledge, nor the breadth of experience requisite 
for a mastery of these phenomena. Other men and 
women are disqualified to pass judgment upon life 
because they are too constantly subject to moods to 
see clearly and to report accurately what they see ; 
and a deep dispassionateness lies at the foundation 
of all adequate judgment of life. For obvious reasons, 
the testimony of the diseased mind is untrustworthy ; 
it is often deeply interesting, but it has no authority. 
The " Journal " of Marie Bashkirtseff has a peculiar 
interest, a kind of uncanny fascination, because it is 
the confession of a human soul, and everything that 
reveals the human soul in any phase of experience is 
interesting ; but as a criticism of life the " Journal " 
does not count. The novels of Guy de Maupassant 
have a great charm ; they are full of a very high order 
of observation ; they are skilful works of art ; but they 
are misleading interpretations of life because they were 
the work of a man of diseased nature, — a man of 
distorted vision. Beauty of form does not always 
imply veracity of idea ; and while beauty has its own 
claim upon us, the ideas which it clothes have no claim 
upon us unless they are the product of clear vision 
and sound judgment. It is one of the tragic facts of 
life that a thing may be beautiful and at the same 
time poisonous ; but we do not take the poison because 
it comes in a beautiful form. We are too much the 
prey of invalidism ; we give too much credence to hos- 
pital reports of life. We need more Homers and 



1 1 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

Scotts, and fewer Rousseaus and Bashkirtseffs. We 
need to rid ourselves of the delusion that there is any 
distinction about disease, any rare and precious quality 
in morbid tastes, temperamental depression, and pessi- 
mism. The large, virile, healthful natures, who see 
things as they are, and rise above the mists and fogs 
of mood, are the only witnesses whose testimony about 
life is worth taking, for they are the only witnesses 
who know what life is. 



MANNER AND MAN. 

Ruskin's declaration that when we stand before a 
great work of art we are conscious that we are in the 
presence, not of a great effort, but of a great power, 
touches the very heart of the artist's secret. For there 
is nothing so clear to the student of art in all its forms 
as the fact that its mysterious charm resides, not in any 
specific skill or gift, but in its quality, that subtle 
effluence of its inward nature. The loveliness of 
nature is sometimes so transcendent that the delight it 
conveys is akin to pain ; it brings us so near the 
absolute beauty that a keen sense of separation and 
imperfection besets us. The still, lustrous evenings 
on the Mediterranean sometimes bring with them an 
almost overwhelming loneliness ; they fill the imagina- 
tion with the vision of a beauty not yet held in sure pos- 
session. About every work of art there is something 
baffling ; we do not quite master it ; we are not able 
to go with free foot where it leads. Nor are we able 
to explain the processes by which it receives and con- 
veys its charm. If it were merely a great effort, we 
could discover its secret ; but it is not a great effort, 
it is a great power. 

Nothing that flows from a great work is so significant 
or so impressive as this impression of power, — of a 



120 MY STUDY FIRE. 

great inward wealth in the nature of the artist which is 
inexhaustible. A hint of toil dispels the magic of a 
picture as certainly as the smell of the midnight lamp 
robs the written word of its charm, or the perception 
of calculated effects breaks the spell of oratory. The 
artist does not become an artist until craftsmanship 
has become so much a part of himself that it has 
ceased to have any abstract being to his thought; it 
has simply become his way of doing things, his manner 
of expression. There is nothing more significant of 
the reality and the finality of art than the searching 
tests which confront the man who endeavours to master 
it, — tests which protect it from the touch of all save 
the greatest, and preserve it inviolate from the contam- 
ination of low aims and vulgar tastes. Nothing is so 
absolutely secure as art; its integrity is inviolate 
because, by the law of its nature, it cannot be created 
save by those who comprehend and reverence it. It 
is as impossible to make art common or vulgar as to 
stain the heavens or rob the Jungfrau of its soft and 
winning majesty. It is easy to call commonplace or 
ignoble productions works of art, to exploit them and 
hold them before the world as types and standards of 
beauty ; but popular ignorance is powerless to convey 
to a book or a picture that which it does not possess 
in itself. There is a brief confusion of ideas, a short- 
lived popularity, and then comes that final oblivion 
which awaits the common and the inferior masquerad- 
ing in the guise of art. " The Heavenly Twins " and 
the " Yellow Aster " provoke wide comment, and 



MANNER AND MAN. 121 

alarm the timid who love real books and dread any 
cheapening of the noble art of literature ; but there is 
no cause for alarm : these books of the moment, and 
all books of their kind, are separated from literature as 
obviously and as finally as the wax imitation from the 
flower that blooms, dewy, fragrant, and magically fresh, 
on the edges of the wood. What is called popular 
taste does not decide the question of the presence or 
absence of artistic quality ; a work of art justifies itself ; 
for its appeal is not to the taste of the moment, but to 
that instinct for beauty in the soul which sooner or 
later recognises the conformity of the human product 
to the divine reality. It is to the eternal element in 
men that the great work speaks, and its place is deter- 
mined, not by capricious and changing tastes, but by 
its fidelity to that absolute beauty of which every touch 
of art is the revelation. The ignorance of a genera- 
tion may pass by the masterful works of Rembrandt, 
but the question of the greatness and authority of 
" The Night-Watch " and " The Gilder " was never for 
a moment in the hands of the artist's contemporaries 
or successors ; it was in Rembrandt's hands alone. 
Taste changes, but beauty is absolute and eternal. 

The law which bases the power to produce art, not 
upon external skill, but upon the nature of the artist, 
not only protects it forever from pretenders and 
tricksters, but allies it to what is deepest and greatest 
in the life of the world. The magic of Shakespeare's 
style is not more wonderful than the veracity of his 
thought. The old proverb, " Manners maketh man," 



122 MY STUDY FIRE. 

was never more clearly verified than in the case of this 
noble artist, whose style is at once so unmistakable and 
so literally inimitable. Those who have not learned 
the interior relation of style to soul, and who do not 
clearly see that style is not an element in literature, 
but literature itself, will do well to meditate on " The 
Tempest," or even on " The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona." For in Shakespeare at his best we have 
that identification of the artist with life, that absorption 
of knowledge into personality, that realisation of the 
eternal unity between truth of idea and beauty of 
form, which mark the perfection of art In the finest 
Shakespearean dramas we are never conscious of 
effort; we are always conscious of power. The 
knowledge, the manner, and the man are one ; there 
is perfect assimilation of the outward world by the 
inward spirit ; idea and expression are so harmonious 
that the form is but the flowering of the soul. When 
observation has passed into meditation, and meditation 
has transformed knowledge into truth, and the brood- 
ing imagination has incorporated truth into the nature 
of the artist, then comes the creative moment, and the 
outward form grows not only out of the heart of the 
thought, but out of the soul of the man. Shakespeare 
is full of these magical transformations by which knowl- 
edge becomes power, and power passes on into 
beauty ; and in these transformations the mystery and 
the processes of art are hidden but not wholly 
concealed. 



THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 

The gospel of personal righteousness finds many 
voices j the gospel of a full and rich life, fed from all 
the divine sources of truth, beauty, and power, still 
needs advocates. The old atheism which shut God 
out of a large part of his world still lingers like those 
drifts of snow that, in secluded places, elude the 
genial sun. Men are as slow to learn the divinity of 
nature as they have been to learn the divinity of 
humanity ; as slow to accept the revelation of nature 
as to accept that of the human soul. It is difficult to 
realise how completely nature was lost to men during 
the Middle Ages ; how comparatively untouched hu- 
man life was by association with the countless aspects 
of sea and sky; how generally the union between 
men and the sublime house in which they lived was 
broken. For several centuries the great mass of men 
and women were so estranged from nature that they 
forgot their kinship. It is true that there were in 
every generation men and women to whom the beauty 
of the world did not appeal in vain, but it was a beauty 
obscured by mists of superstition, and the perception 
of which was painfully limited by lack of the deeper 



124 MY STUDY FIRE. 

insight and the larger vision. Woods, flowers, and 
streams, so close at hand, so intimately associated with 
the richest experiences, could not wholly fail of that 
charm which they possess to-day; but while these 
lovely details were seen, the picture as a whole was 
invisible. The popular ballads and epics are not 
lacking in pretty bits of description and sentiment, but 
nature is wholly subordinate ; the sublime background 
against which all modern life is set is invisible. 

It is difficult to imagine a time when men had no 
eye for the landscape, and yet it is one of the most 
notable facts about Petrarch that he was the first man 
of his period to show any interest in that great vision 
which a lofty mountain opens, and which has for the 
men of to-day a delight so poignant as to be almost 
painful. Dante had struck some deep notes which 
showed clearly enough that he was alive to the mystery 
and marvel of the physical world, but Petrarch was the 
earliest of those who have seen clearly the range and 
significance of nature as it stands related to the life of 
men. He celebrated the charms of Vaucluse in letters 
which might have been written by Maurice de Guerin, 
so modern is their tone, so contemporaneous their note 
of intimate companionship. " This lovely region," he 
writes, " is as well adapted as possible to my studies 
and labours, so long as iron necessity compels me to 
live outside of Italy. Morning and evening the hills 
throw welcome shadows ; in the valleys are sun-warmed 
gaps, while far and wide stretches a lovely landscape, 
in which the tracks of animals are seen oftener than 



Petrarch, 



THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 125 

those of men. Deep and undisturbed silence reigns 
everywhere, only broken now and then by the murmur 
of falling waters, the lowing of cattle, and the songs of 
birds." But it was the ascent of Mont Ventoux, 
accompanied by his younger brother and two country- 
men, which stamps Petrarch as one of the great dis- 
coverers of the natural world. There are few more 
significant or fascinating moments in the history of hu- 
man development than that which gave Petrarch his 
first glimpse of the beautiful landscape about Avignon, 
from the crest of the hill ; it marked the begin- 
ning of a new era in the history of the human soul. 
That the majesty of the outlook so overwhelmed 
Petrarch that it drove him back upon himself, brought 
all his sins to mind, and sent him to the " Confes- 
sions of St. Augustine," showed that he was still the 
child of his age ; but the longing which led him to 
make the ascent, despite the warning of the old herds- 
men at the foot of the mountain, showed that he was 
also a man of the new time, and that he had uncon- 
sciously assumed the attitude of the modern mind 
towards nature. 

The redemption of nature from the shadow of sin 
which, to the mediaeval mind, rested upon and dark- 
ened it, has been very slowly accomplished ; but the 
poets, the naturalists, and the scientists have taught us 
much, and our hearts have taught us more. Nature 
has become not only an inexhaustible delight, a con- 
stant and fascinating friend, but the most vital and 
intimate of teachers ; in fact, it is from the study of 



126 MY STUDY FIRE. 

nature, in one form or another, that much of the 
advance in educational efficiency has come ; not the 
improvements in method, but the freshening and deep- 
ening of the educational aim and spirit. Nature, 
through the discoveries of science, has restored bal- 
ance to the mind, and sanity to the spirit of men by 
correcting the false perspective of abstract thinking, by 
flooding the deepest questions with new light, by bring- 
ing into activity a set of faculties almost disused, and 
by adding immeasurably to the resources of the human 
spirit. In the Middle Ages attention was concentrated 
upon the soul, and men learned much from their 
eager and passionate self-questioning ; but it was a 
very inadequate and distorted view of life which they 
reached, because one of the great sources of revelation 
was left untouched. In modern times the world of 
nature has been searched with tireless patience, great 
truths relating to man's place in the sublime move- 
ment of the universe have come to light, and the dis- 
torted vision of the inward world has been corrected 
by the clear vision of the outward world. The study 
of nature has yielded a new conception of the nature 
of the divine will expressed through law, of the divine 
design interpreted by the order and progress of the 
phenomena of the physical universe, of the marvellous 
beauty of the divine mind which Tennyson was think- 
ing of when, looking long and steadfastly into the 
depths of a slow-moving stream, he cried out in awe 
and wonder, " What an imagination God has ! " 

Men are saner, healthier, wiser, since they began to 



THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 1 27 

find God in nature and to receive the facts of nature 
as a divine revelation. The soul has looked away from 
herself and out into the marvellous universe, and 
learned from a new teacher the wonder, the beauty, 
and the greatness of her life. 



THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 

In Dr. Parsons' fine lines " On a Bust of Dante " 
there is a verse which suggests even more than it 
conveys : — 

" Faithful if this wan image be, 

No dream his life was — but a fight! 
Could any Beatrice see 

A lover in that anchorite ? 
To that cold Ghibeline's gloomy sight 

Who could have guessed the visions came 
Of Beauty, veiled with heavenly light, 

In circles of eternal flame ? " 

The contrast between the outward and the inward life 
— the one all shadow and hardship, the other all 
splendour and affluence — has never been more impres- 
sively disclosed than in the story of the Florentine 
poet whose brief and bitter years have in their train a 
fame of universal range and almost piercing lustre. It 
may be doubted whether the " Divine Comedy " 
would have been so widely treasured if the story of the 
singer had been less pathetic and significant. If its 
authorship were unknown, it would still remain one of 
the incomparable achievements of art ; but the per- 
sonal anguish behind it lends it that spell which issues 



THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 1 29 

out of experience, and to which no human heart can 
be wholly indifferent. There are many to whom the 
poem would be incomprehensible ; there are few to 
whom the poet would appeal in vain. If his thought 
often took wing beyond the range of the common 
thought, his experience shared with all humanity that 
visitation of sorrow from which none wholly escape. 
The very completeness of the shipwreck of his per- 
sonal fortunes makes the greatness of his achieve- 
ment the more impressive ; and the hardness of his 
lot lends a new splendour to his imagination. 

For Dante, the imagination meant not only the 
power of creating on a great scale, but also liberation 
from the iron bars of circumstance which imprisoned 
him. He was banished from Florence, but no decree 
could shut his thought out from the streets and squares 
that were so dear to him. It is true that he has spoken 
in memorable words of the sadness of revisiting in 
dreams alone the places one loves ; but there was, 
nevertheless, in that power of passing at will from 
Verona to Florence, a resource of incalculable value. 
The body might be bound ; the man was free. This 
faculty, which sets us free from so many of our limita- 
tions and gives us citizenship in all ages and countries, 
is not only the one creative power in us, but is also our 
greatest resource. No gift is so rare and none so 
priceless as a powerful and productive imagination. 
That it is rare, the mass of contemporary verse-writing 
demonstrates with almost pathetic conclusiveness ; that 
it is above price, the great works of art abundantly 
9 



130 MY STUDY FIRE. 

prove. But from the purely personal point of view—* 
the interest, the variety, and the power of the individ- 
ual life — no gift is so much to be prized. To the 
possessor of this magical faculty the outward happen- 
ings are, at the worst, of secondary importance. 
Homer will not find blindness too great a trial, if Troy 
still stands in his vision with the hosts contending 
about it, and the white-armed Nausicaa still greets the 
much-travelled Ulysses on the beach; and Shake- 
speare could have borne heavier sorrows than most 
men have known, the Forest of Arden, Prospero's 
Island, and the enchanted woodland of the Midsummer 
Night's Dream being open to him. Spenser could 
find refuge from the tumult of Ireland in the dominion 
of the Faery Queen ; Milton, with sealed eyes, solitary 
in an age apostate to his faith and hope, saw Paradise 
with undimmed vision ; and Browning, in the uproar, 
contention, and uncertainty of this turbulent century, 
heard Pippa, unconsciously touching the tragedy of 
life at so many points, still serenely singing her song 
of faith and peace. 

It is doubtful whether any of us understand what 
the imagination means to us simply as the liberating 
force which throws the doors and windows open. 
When imagination withers and art dies, discontent, 
misery, and revolutions are in order. It is the outlook 
through the windows, the breath of air through the 
open door, that keeps men content in their workshops ; 
where the outlook is shut off and the air no longer 
comes fresh and vital into the close room the workers 



THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 131 

grow reckless and hopeless. For without the imagina- 
tion — the power to look through and beyond our 
conditions — life would be intolerable. Better a great 
activity of the imagination and hard conditions than 
ease of condition and poverty of imagination ; for men 
are never so dangerous as when their bodies are fed 
and their souls starved. A perfectly comfortable 
society deprived of the resources of the imagination, 
would invite and foster the most desperate anarchism ; 
for men live by ideas, not by things. A man who sees 
a great purpose shining before him can endure all 
hardness for the glory that is to come ; the man who 
no longer has desires, because all his wants are met, 
suffers a swift deterioration of nature, and is at last the 
victim of his own prosperity. The Roman noble, in 
Mr. Arnold's striking poem, finds life unbearable 
because his passions are sated, his appetites fed, and 
his imagination dead. He is suffocated by his own 
luxury. Dante, on the other hand, feels keenly his 
condition, but lives more deeply and gloriously than 
any man of his time because, in spite of the hardness 
of his lot, his imagination travels through all worlds, 
and beyond the barren hour discerns the splendours of 
Paradise. The prophets, teachers, and poets, who 
alone have made life bearable, have been the children 
of the imagination, and have had the supreme consola- 
tion of looking through the limitations into which every 
man is born into the great heavens flaming with other 
worlds than ours. For it is the imagination which 
realises the soul in things material and reads this 



1 3 2 MY STUD Y FIRE. 

universe of matter as a symbol, and so liberates us 
from the oppression which comes from mere magnitude 
and mass; which discerns the inner meaning of the 
family, the Church, and the State, and, in spite of all 
frailties and imperfections, makes their divine origin 
credible ; which discovers the end of labour in power, 
of self-denial in freedom, of hardness and suffering in 
the perfecting of the soul. " I am never confused," 
said Emerson, " if I see far enough ; " and the imagi- 
nation is the faculty which sees. Of the several facul- 
ties by the exercise of which men live, it is most 
necessary, practical, and vital ; and yet so little is it 
understood that it is constantly spoken of as something 
very beautiful in its activity, but the especial property 
of artists, poets, and dreamers 1 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 

Goethe used to smile when he was asked for an 
explanation of certain oracular or enigmatical sayings 
in the second part of " Faust." One of the minor 
pleasures of his old age was the consciousness that a 
great many disciples believed in their hearts that he 
had the key to the mysteries in his keeping, and that, 
if he chose, he could answer all the questions which 
had tormented the race from the beginning. There 
was a mysterious reticence, an Olympian reserve, about 
the old poet which went far to confirm this faith, and 
it must be said that Goethe did not go out of his way 
to dispel the illusion. No man knew better than he 
the limitations of knowledge ; he was too great and 
too honest to play with his public ; but when the great 
man has become an absolute sovereign, and has grown 
gray upon the solitary throne, and when, moreover, he 
has the resource of humour for his waning days, he may 
be pardoned for suffering men to entertain a belief in 
an infallibility of the reality of which he is sometimes 
half persuaded himself. " Master," said an awestruck 
young man in Victor Hugo's salon one evening not 
long before the poet's death, "this age has known 
many great spirits, but thou art the greatest of them 



134 MY STUDY FIRE. 

all." " Yes," answered the old poet, without even a 
ghost of a smile, " and the age is passing, and I, too, 
am nearing the end ! " Goethe was free from the 
colossal egotism of Hugo, and, even if he had pos- 
sessed it, his humour would have protected him from 
any expression of it ; but Goethe was not above the 
pleasure of being thought great, nor could he deny 
himself the satisfaction of being regarded as an oracle. 
Probably no man could resist an appeal to self-love so 
unsolicited and so beguiling. 

There is no reason to doubt, however, that Goethe 
sometimes took refuge in silence because he could not 
answer the questions that were propounded to him 
about his own work. When such questions were asked 
he always assumed an oracular manner which deepened 
the impression that, if he chose, he might disclose 
very deep things, and withdraw the veil from very great 
mysteries. This evasion must not be set down to his 
discredit, however; it was the refuge of a man who 
knew too much and had done too many great things to 
dread that confession of ignorance from which a man 
of lesser range and mind might have shrunk. He had 
a touch of vanity like his fellows, however, and his turn 
for proverbial and epigrammatic speech made the orac- 
ular tone very attractive to him. The fundamental 
fact about the matter is, however, that there were many 
things in Goethe's work of which he could not have 
given a clear explanation, because, like every other 
great mind, he builded better than he knew. The 
critical habit was strong with him, and very few men 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 135 

have thought more exhaustively and thoroughly about 
the principles and processes of art than he ; neverthe- 
less, it remains true that the deepest and richest parts 
of his work were the creation of the unconscious rather 
than the conscious Goethe. 

It was one of Goethe's most profound and fruitful 
ideas that what a man would do greatly he must do 
with his whole nature. He was the first great artist to 
formulate clearly the fundamental law that the artist is 
conditioned by his own nature, that art rests upon life, 
and that there is, therefore, in a true work of art an 
expression of a man's complete nature, — his body, his 
mind, and his heart. For the artist is not a mechanic 
who skilfully devises processes to secure a certain defi- 
nite end ; he is not a trained mind and a trained hand 
working by rule and system ; he is a spontaneous and 
original force in the world, as mysterious to himself as 
to others, — full of unknown possibilities ; fed, sleeping 
and waking, by a thousand invisible streams of impulse 
and power ; expanded unconsciously to himself by the 
very process of living ; developed as much by feeling 
as by thought ; and slowly gathering to himself a great 
inward wealth of knowledge, vitality, beauty, and power. 
When at last such a nature produces, it does not work 
mechanically ; it creates by giving itself ; by expressing 
what is deepest and truest in itself through the forms 
of art. In every product of mechanical skill, however 
perfect, the process can be discovered ; but no analysis 
ever yet surprised nature in the making of a flower. 
The living thing that reaches its perfection by growth, 



136 MY STUDY FIRE. 

being, so to speak, all of a piece, and attaining its de- 
velopment by the unfolding of itself, eludes the keenest 
analysis and remains a mystery in spite of the almost 
infinite patience of science. In like manner, a work 
of art, being a growth and not a mechanical product, 
remains mysterious and inexplicable even to its creator. 
There are certain elements in it which he consciously 
contributes ; there are other elements which are there 
without his planning or knowledge. A work of art is 
the joint product of the conscious and the unconscious 
man, and there is, consequently, much in every such 
work which transcends, not the nature, but the mind, of 
the artist. For every great man builds better than he 
knows. 

It is not difficult to believe, therefore, that there 
were things in " Faust " which Goethe could not com- 
pletely explain. The poem was, in fact, of wider range 
than he knew. Its significance as an interpretation or 
representation of life was not undervalued by him, but 
there are many truths in it of which he did not perceive 
the full import, and later students find in it much which 
is unquestionably present in it, but of which Goethe 
was unconscious. The conscious Goethe, planning, 
brooding, shaping, did much ; but the unconscious 
Goethe, living, feeling, suffering, acting, did more. And 
this is true not only of "Faust," but of the Book of 
Job, of the " Iliad," of the " Divine Comedy," and of 
" Lear " and " The Tempest." It is certainly not true 
that the great artist is the tool of an impulse, an irre- 
sponsible inspiration, and puts forth the sublimest con- 



THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 1 37 

ceptions without any idea of their depth and range. 
Those who believe that the author of " Hamlet " and 
" The Tempest " had a magical gift of dramatic expres- 
sion, but no comprehension of philosophic relations 
and values, cannot have read "Troilus and Cressida" 
with any care. Shakespeare knew what he was doing 
when he wrote " Lear," as did Goethe when he wrote 
" Faust," and Tennyson when he wrote " In Memo- 
riam ; " in each case, however, there was inwrought 
into the very nature of the poet a prophetic element 
which gave his thought a range beyond that of his 
experience, and his vision a clearness and scope be- 
yond those of his thought. It is the peculiar gift of 
the man of genius that when he portrays the individual 
he brings the type before us, when he gives the fact he 
suggests the truth which interprets it, when he reports 
the phenomena he reveals the law behind it ; and so 
he constantly, and for the most part, unconsciously, lets 
us into the universal by setting before us the particular. 



THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 

In reading Marlowe one is brought face to face, not 
only with tragic situations, but with the elemental 
tragedy, — the tragedy which has its rise in the conflict 
between the infinite desires of the soul and rigid re- 
strictions of its activity. The master of " the mighty 
line " never learned that lesson of self-mastery which 
Shakespeare studied so faithfully ; he was always wast- 
ing his immense force on the impossible, and matching 
his powerful genius against those immutable conditions 
imposed upon men, not to dwarf but to develop them. 
In art no less than in morals supreme achievement is 
conditioned not only upon a free use of one's powers, 
but upon a clear recognition of their limits ; the great 
artist never attempts the impossible. In "Tambur- 
laine " Marlowe strove not only to portray a person- 
ality striving to transcend human limitations, but to 
pass beyond them himself by the sheer force of his 
genius ; but neither the conqueror nor the dramatist 
evaded the play of that law which binds ultimate 
freedom to immediate obedience. Shakespeare, on the 
other hand, achieved the most impressive success in 
modern literature when he dealt with the same problem 
in " Lear," — a success based on a clear perception of 
the exact limits within which the human personality 
may express itself. 



THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 1 39 

We touch at this point not only the essence of 
the deepest tragedy, but the secret of the highest art ; 
for the elemental tragedy is the struggle between the 
will and the conditions imposed upon its expres- 
sion, and the secret of art resides, not only in 
the depth and vitality of the artist's mastery of his 
materials, but also in the clearness of his perception of 
the decisive line between the possible and the impos- 
sible. The Classical writers, with their delicate sense 
of proportion, harmony, and form, never attempted to 
pass beyond the limits of a sound art ; they were 
sometimes formal and cold, but they were never tumul- 
tuous, unbalanced, and lawless. In Sophocles, for in- 
stance, one never loses consciousness of the presence 
of a genius which, dealing with the most perplexing 
and terrible questions of destiny, is never tempted to 
pass the bounds of clear and definite artistic expression, 
but sustains the theme to the end with a masterful 
self-restraint and majesty of repose. In that noble 
balance, based on the harmony, not on the subjection 
of the heart and mind of the artist, one gets a glimpse 
of one of the great ends of art ; which is not to ex- 
press but to suggest that which transcends human 
thought and speech. For the great play, statue, pic- 
ture, speech are prophetic, and find their fulfilment, 
not in themselves, but in the imagination which comes 
under their spell ; the more complete their beauty, 
therefore, the more powerfully do they affirm the exist- 
ence of a beauty beyond themselves. The definite- 
ness of Greek art was not a limitation ■, it was a source 



140 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of transcendent power. It is true, it shut the Greek 
artist out of some great fields ; but he was not ready 
to enter them, and the divine apparition of beauty 
always moved with his work and issued out of it as 
a soul is revealed by a body as beautiful as itself. 
The Venus of Milos is not the image of a saint, but 
there is that in the mutilated statue which makes the 
divine perfection not only credible but actual. 

For there is, in supreme excellence of any kind, an 
immense exhilaration for the human spirit, — a power 
of impulsion, which leads or drives it out of itself into 
new spiritual quests and ventures. Dante had no 
thought of a re-awakening of the mind of man ; he 
did not discern that thrilling chapter of history so soon 
to be written ; but to that great movement the " Divine 
Comedy " was one of the chief contributing forces. 
The production of such a masterpiece was in itself a 
new liberation of the human spirit, and set the cur- 
rents of imagination and action flowing freely once 
more. It matters little whether a great book has defi- 
nite teaching for men or not ; it is always a mighty 
force for liberation. Greek art had its limitations of 
theme and manner, but its perfection brought con- 
stantly before the mind that ultimate perfection, which 
it evaded so far as definite treatment was concerned, 
but the existence of which was implied in its own 
existence, and the fuller revelation of which it was 
always unconsciously predicting. 

This thought hints at the working out in art of that 
deepest and most mysterious of all the laws of life, 



THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 141 

which declares that he who would save his life must 
lose it : that sublime contradiction which seems always 
to be assailing man's happiness and is always preserv- 
ing it. The restraint of the great Classical dramatists, 
which to a man like Marlowe seems a surrender of 
power, is, in reality, the disclosure of a power so great 
that it makes one forget the limitations of the artist by 
giving us the freedom of the art. For when a man 
submits himself to the laws of his craft he ceases to 
be its bondman and becomes its master. Marlowe 
evaded or refused this submission, and his work, while 
it discloses great force, makes us painfully aware of 
limitations and crudity; Shakespeare, on the other 
hand, cheerfully submitted to the laws of his craft, and 
his work, by reason of its balance and harmony, con- 
veys a sense of limitless power, of boundless capacity 
for mastering the most difficult problems of life and 
art. Never was the glorious commonplace that a 
man becomes free by obedience more beautifully 
illustrated. 

The Greek artist registered one of the most decisive 
advances in human thought when for the Oriental 
indeterminateness he substituted his own definiteness ; 
and the human spirit took a great forward step when 
it discerned that by subjection to the law of its growth 
it would ultimately achieve that freedom which the 
Oriental mind had attempted to grasp at once, and 
which it had failed to seize. Between Plato and 
Aristotle and the Oriental thinkers before them there 
was a great gulf fixed which remains to-day impassable, 



142 MY STUDY FIRE. 

although many fragile and fantastic structures have of 
late years swung airily over the abyss. In the Greek 
thought the foundations of Western civilisation are set, 
and in that thought rest also the eternal foundations 
of art. For personality, freedom, and responsibility 
were the fundamental Greek ideas, and they are the 
ideas which underlie Western life and art. The Greek 
artist recognised the integrity of his own nature, and 
discerned his consequent freedom and responsibility. 
He did not lose himself in God, nor merge himself 
in nature ; he stood erect ; he worshipped, he observed, 
and he created. He did not, through failure of clear 
thought, attempt the impossible, as did his fellow in 
the farther East ; he saw clearly the limitations of his 
faculty, and he discerned that freedom and power lay 
in accepting, not in ignoring, those limitations. He 
constructed the Parthenon instead of miles of rock- 
hewn temple ; and for monsters, and gigantic, unreal 
symbols he carved the Olympian Zeus and the in- 
imitable Venus of the Louvre Gallery. He peopled the 
world with divinities, and in his marvellous illustration 
of the fecundity of the human spirit, and of its power, 
he created an art which not only affirms the integrity 
of the soul, but predicts its immortality. There have 
been great artists from that day to this, and art has 
passed through many phases, but the old law finds 
constant illustration ; and between Tennyson and 
Swinburne, as between Shakespeare and Marlowe, 
one discerns the gain and the waste of power inherent, 
the first in self-restraint, the second in self-assertion. 



STRUGGLE IN ART. 

Marlowe's excess and lack of restraint debarred 
him from the highest achievement as an artist ; but his 
vitality and force were qualities of lasting attraction 
and incalculable value. By virtue of his rich and pas- 
sionate nature he stands in close proximity to the 
great group from whose magic circle he was shut out 
only by his failure to obey the laws of his art. Few 
writers have possessed a force of imagination and 
passion so great and so impressive ; and it is interest- 
ing to note how much more quickly men are drawn 
to the Titan than to the Olympian; for struggle is 
pathetically universal, and the repose of harmonious 
achievement pathetically rare among men. The greater 
the art, the slower the recognition, as a rule. The im- 
pression made by a lawless or unregulated force is 
always more immediate than that made by a mastered 
and harmonised power. The rending of a cliff makes 
every observer conscious of the force of the explosive, 
but how few ever think of the force put forth in lifting 
an oak from its rootage in the earth to the great height 
where all the winds of heaven play upon it ! 

The " storm and stress " period moves all hearts and 
stirs in the young imagination one knows not what 



144 MY STUDY FIRE. 

dreams and desires, but when the ferment of spirit is 
past, and the new thought has taken its enduring form, 
what a sense of disappointment comes to a host of 
aspiring souls ! The struggle touched and intoxicated 
them with a sense of something not only great but 
akin to their own experience; the clarification and 
final expression of the new spirit in art seems some- 
how remote and cold. When the "Sorrows of 
Werther " appeared a thrill ran through Germany ; but 
when " Tasso " and " Iphigenia " were given to the 
world with what indifference they were received ! The 
boy reads "The Robbers" with bated breath, but ten 
years later he knows that the Schiller of the Wallen- 
stein trilogy was an incomparably greater writer than 
the Schiller of " The Robbers." Revolt is easier than 
reconstruction ; at the barricade every one is swept by 
a consuming enthusiasm, but the moment the attempt 
is made to give the new time order and stability, 
divisions and indifference appear. Struggle, however 
noble, is for the moment ; achievement has something 
of eternity in it. The Titan is always a striking figure, 
but it is the Olympian who endures and rules. 

The element of struggle is, however, a part of the 
greatest art, and the motive of much of the highest 
work done by men has been the harmonising of antag- 
onistic forces and the final and beautiful synthesis of 
contending ideas. It is by struggle that life is broad- 
ened, and the human spirit freed from many of its 
limitations ; and there is nothing nobler in man than 
that constant dissatisfaction with his condition which 



STRUGGLE IN ART 145 

provokes the struggle. The race is always reaching 
forward to grasp better things than it yet possesses. 
It is haunted by visions of perfection, and driven on 
by aspirations and dreams which will not suffer it to 
rest in any present achievement. This discontent is 
not a superficial restlessness ; it is the evidence of the 
infinite possibilities of man's nature, and of his inability 
to stop short of complete development. All literature 
bears witness to this arduous, sorrowful, inspiring 
struggle for a more harmonious life, so often defeated, 
so constantly renewed. 

In the record of this sublime drama, of which man 
himself is the protagonist, there is found one great 
means of escape from those limitations of experience 
which give us such constant pain and fill us with a 
consuming desire to escape from ourselves. " Sensa- 
tions of all kinds have been crowding upon me," writes 
Amiel, — " the delights of a walk under the rising sun, 
the charms of a wonderful view, longing for travel, 
and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emotion, for 
life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passionate 
wish to live, to feel, to express, stirred the depths of 
my heart. It was a sudden reawakening of youth, a 
flash of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth 
of the wings of desire. I was overpowered by a host 
of conquering, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I 
forgot my age, my obligations, my duties, my vexa- 
tions, and youth leapt within me as though life were 
beginning again. It was as though something explo- 
sive had caught fire, and one's soul were scattered to 



146 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the four winds ; in such a mood one would fain devour 
the whole world, experience everything, see every- 
thing. Faust's ambition enters into one — universal 
desire — a horror of one's own prison cell. One 
throws off one's hair shirt, and one would fain gather 
the whole of nature into one's arms and heart." 

How often Amiel made the rounds of his cell, and 
how vainly he strove to break the bars of his temper- 
ament, the world knows from that incomparable record, 
in the writing of which his spirit found the escape 
sought for in vain in other directions. Self-contained, 
reticent, shy, how few dreamed of the turbulence in 
the soul of the formal and didactic teacher in the 
formal and rather pedantic little city of Calvin and 
Rousseau ! Without the " Journal," the struggle and 
the wealth of Amiel's nature would never have been 
known ; it adds another chapter to that book of life 
in which the race records its secret hopes and de- 
spairs. And is it not pathetically significant that the 
motive with which the Greek dramatists dealt with so 
strong a hand reappears in this quiet drama enacted 
in the soul of the Genevan Professor of Moral Phil- 
osophy? On the widest as on the narrowest stage it 
is the motive which all men understand, because it is 
a part of every human experience. The Old Testa- 
ment, the Epics of Homer, the "Divine Comedy," 
the plays of Shakespeare, and " Faust " are among its 
greatest records, but its story is in all lives. 

To every man comes the struggle, to a few great 
writers the power to interpret the struggle and predict 



STRUGGLE IN ART 1 47 

or portray its issue in immediate reconciliation or in 
ultimate achievement. And so art becomes an avenue 
of escape from the prison of personal experience, not 
only by taking us out of ourselves, but by disclosing 
the identity of our individual struggle with the universal 
struggle of humanity. It opens the door out of the 
particular into the universal, and it constantly predicts 
the final resolution of discords into harmony, the ulti- 
mate reconciliation of contending ideas and forces ; 
and when, as in " Lear," it gives no suggestion of an 
answer to the problems involved, the very magnitude 
of the drama which it unfolds compels the inference of 
an adequate solution on some other and larger stage. 



THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. 



It is one of the pains of the artistic temperament 
that its exaltations of mood and its ecstasies of spirit 
must be largely solitary. The air of this century is 
not genial to that intimacy with beauty which solicits 
easy interchange of confidences among those who 
enjoy it. The mass of men are preoccupied and 
unsensitive on that side of life which has for the artist 
the deepest reality ; they are given over to pursuits 
which are imperative in their demands, and fruitful in 
their rewards, but which lead far from the pursuit of 
beauty. There have been times when the artistic 
temper, if not widely shared, was generally under- 
stood, and such times will come again when the 
modern world becomes more thoroughly harmonised 
with itself ; meantime the man who has the joys of the 
artistic temperament will accept them as a sufficient 
consolation for its pains. 

For the essence of this temperament is not so much 
its sensitiveness to every revelation of the beautiful as 
its passion for perfection. There is in the life of the 
artist an element of pain, which never goes beyond a 
dumb sense of discontent in men of coarser mould ; 
for the artist is compelled to live with his ideals ! 



THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. 1 49 

Other men have occasional glimpses of their ideals ; 
the artist lives his life in their presence and under their 
searching glances. A man is in the way to become 
genuine and noble when his ideals draw near and make 
their home with him instead of floating before him like 
summer clouds, forever dissolving and reforming on the 
distant horizon ; but he is also in the way of very real 
anguish of spirit. Our ideals, when we establish them 
under our own roofs, are as relentless as the Furies 
who thronged about Orestes ; they will not let us rest. 
The world may applaud, but if they avert their faces 
reputation is a mockery and success a degradation. 
The passion for perfection is the divinest possession of 
the soul, but it makes all lower gratifications, all com- 
promises with the highest standards, impossible. The 
man whom it dominates can never taste the easy satis- 
factions which assuage the thirst of those who have 
it not ; for him it must always be the best or nothing. 

Flaubert, Mr. James tells us, ought always to be 
cited as one of the martyrs of the plastic idea; the 
" torment of style " was never eased in his case, and 
despite his immense absorption and his tireless toil, he 
failed to touch the invisible goal for which he set out. 
" Possessed," says one of his critics, who was also a 
devotee of the supreme excellence, "of an absolute 
belief that there exists but one way of expressing one 
thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, 
one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman 
labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that 
word, that verb, that epithet. In this way he believed 



150 MY STUDY FIRE. 

in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when 
a true word seemed to him to lack euphony, still went 
on seeking another with invincible patience, certain 
that he had not yet got hold of the unique word. . . . 
A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the 
same moment, always with this desperate "certitude 
fixed in his spirit, — among all the expressions in the 
world, there is but one — one form, one mode — to 
express what I want to say." 

To a mind capable of absolute devotion, such an 
ideal as Flaubert set before him not only draws him 
on through laborious days, deaf to the voices of pleas- 
ure, but consumes him with an inward fire. The aim 
of the novelist was not simply to set the best words in 
the best order ; it was to lay hold upon perfection ; 
to touch those ultimate limits beyond which the 
human spirit cannot go, and where that spirit stands 
face to face with the absolute perfection. This pas- 
sionate pursuit of the finalities of form and expression 
is as far removed from the pursuit of mere craftsman- 
ship as art itself is separated from mere mechanical 
skill ; and yet so little is the real significance of art 
understood among us that it is continually confused 
with craftsmanship, and spoken of as something apart 
from a man's self, something born of skill and akin to 
the mechanical, instead of being the very last and 
supreme outflowing of that within us which is spon- 
taneous and inspired. In a fine burst of indignation 
at this profanation of one of the greatest words in 
human speech, Mr. Aldrich says : — 



THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. I 5 I 

" ' Let art be all in all,' one time I said, 

And straightway stirred the hypercritic gall ; 
I said not, ' Let technique be all in all/ 
But art — a wider meaning. Worthless, dead — 
The shell without its pearl, the corpse of things, 
Mere words are, till the spirit lends them wings ; 
The poet who breathes no soul into his lute 
Falls short of art : 't were better he were mute. 

" The workmanship wherewith the gold is wrought 
Adds yet a richness to the richest gold : 
Who lacks the art to shape his thought, I hold, 
Were little poorer if he lacked the thought. 
The statue's slumbers were unbroken still 
Within the marble, had the hand no skill. 
Disparage not the magic touch that gives 
The formless thought the grace whereby it lives ! " 

Flaubert did not touch the goal, in spite of his 
heroic toil, and largely because of that toil. For he 
sought too strenuously, with intention too insistent and 
dominant ; he was driven by his passion instead of 
being inspired by it. It is as true of our relations with 
our ideals as of our relations with our friends that we 
must preserve our independence ; our ideals must 
lead, but they must not tyrannise over us. There is 
something in us which even our ideals must respect, 
and that something is our own individuality. The per- 
fection which a man pursues must be the perfection 
of his own quality, not a perfection which is foreign to 
him. It is himself which he is to raise to the highest 
point of power, not something outside of himself. 
Flaubert understood this, for he once wrote : " In 



152 MY STUDY FIRE. 

literature the best chance one has is by following one's 
temperament and exaggerating it." Nevertheless, one 
of the defects of his work is the fact that its perfection 
is not the perfection of his temperament, — is, indeed, 
a kind of objective perfection, which seems at times 
detached so entirely from temperament that it is hard 
and cold and devoid of atmosphere. To this detach- 
ment is due perhaps the failure to secure that ultimate 
excellence of which his whole life was one arduous pur- 
suit. For Flaubert rarely passed beyond the stage of 
effort ; his pen rarely caught that native rhythm which 
we detect in Scott and Thackeray and Tolstoi at their 
best, — that perfect adequacy, manifested in perfect 
ease, which makes us forget the toil in the perfection 
of the work, and which assures us that the slow hand 
of the artisan has become the swift hand of the artist. 
Surely the way of perfection is straight and narrow, 
and few there be who follow it to the end ! 



CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER. 

A good deal has been said about the influence of 
criticism as a restraining and corrective force con- 
stantly and effectively brought to bear on writers ; and 
it is probably true that no small gains in the direction 
of better and sounder work have been made as a result 
of criticism, even when it has been inadequate and 
coarse in tone. There is good reason to believe that 
Tennyson felt keenly the unnecessary orTensiveness 
with which the tinge of sentimentality and the defective 
energy of expression in his work given to the world in 
i S3 2 were pointed out by more than one critical 
writer of the time ; nevertheless, the young poet prof- 
ited by correction so ungraciously administered, and 
what might have developed into an unsound strain be- 
came, ten years later, the evidence of a peculiar ripe- 
ness and beauty. In many cases, doubtless, criticism, 
even when it has fallen below its highest levels, has 
been a useful teacher and monitor, and in this way 
has rendered genuine service to literature. But this 
sen-ice of criticism is, after all, secondary and inci- 
dental ; for it is the writer, and not the critic, who 
makes literature, not only in the sense of creating, but 
also of determining its forms. The critic often tells 



154 MY STUD Y FIRE. 

the writer facts about himself which are of lasting 
value in his artistic education, but in the end it is 
the writer who marks out the lines along which the 
critic must move. 

Criticism was long oblivious of this fundamental fact 
in its relation to distinctively creative work ; it was long 
under the impression that the final authority resided in 
itself rather than in the work upon which it passed 
judgment with entire confidence in its own com- 
petency. It was not until criticism passed into the 
hands of men of insight and creative power that it 
discovered its chief function to be that of compre- 
hension, and its principal service that of interpretation. 
Not that it has surrendered its function of judging 
according to the highest standards, but that it has 
discovered that the forms of excellence change from 
time to time, and that the question with regard to a work 
of art is not whether it conforms to types of excellence 
already familiar, but whether it is an ultimate expres- 
sion of beauty or power. In every case the artist 
creates the type, and the critic proves his competency 
by recognising it ; so that while the critic holds the 
artist to rigid standards of veracity and craftsmanship, it 
is the artist who lays down the law to the critic. As 
an applied art, based on deduction, and constructing 
its canons apart from the material which literature 
furnishes, criticism was notable mainly for its fallibility. 
As an art based on induction, and framing its laws ac- 
cording to the methods and principles illustrated in 
the best literature, it has advanced from a secondary 



CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER. 1 55 

to a leading place among the literary forms now most 
widely employed and most widely influential. 

The real service of criticism is to the reader rather 
than to the writer, and it serves literature chiefly by 
making its recognition on the part of the reader more 
prompt and more complete. A work of art does not 
need to be preserved, it preserves itself; there is in 
it a vitality which endures indifference and survives 
neglect. What is often lost, however, is the immediate 
influence of such a work. It has happened again and 
again in the history of literature that a great book has 
been long unrecognised ; and a resource which might 
have enriched life has been put aside until men were 
educated to receive and use it. It is as an educative 
force that criticism has developed its most immediate 
and, perhaps, its most lasting usefulness. 

For while great works of art do not need the aid 
of criticism to preserve them from the danger of actual 
disappearance, they do need its service as an inter- 
preter. What Addison had to say about Milton did 
not protect the Puritan poet from any danger of per- 
manent obscurity, but it went far toward making a 
clearer understanding of his greatness possible. It 
was a service to the English people, and, in so much 
as it opened their eyes to an excellence which had 
been widely denied, it was also a service to English 
literature. The old dramas which Lamb loved with 
such missionary zeal were in no sense dependent upon 
that zeal for their preservation ; but they gained by it a 
recognition more general and more intelligent than they 



1 5 6 MY STUD Y FIRE. 

had won even from the generation which had heard 
their noble or terrible lines declaimed on the stage. 
Cromwell would have remained the great soul he was had 
Carlyle passed him by, but it was Carlyle's searching 
insight and victorious art which restored the Protector 
to his place in the history and the heart of England. 
To comprehend a work of art, a certain degree of 
education must be attained ; and the greater and more 
original the work of art, the deeper and more thorough 
the education required. For it is the peculiar quality 
of genius to be prophetic, and to create in advance — 
sometimes far in advance — of general comprehension. 
Society must grow into the larger thought which at first 
often escapes it, and grow into the openmindedness to 
which beauty in a new form successfully makes its ap- 
peal. The greater writers, whose creative energy finds 
new channels and manifests itself under unfamiliar 
aspects, are always in advance of the general capacity 
of appreciation, and are always in need of interpreters ; 
and this office of interpretation has become the chief 
function of criticism. Taine interprets English liter- 
ature by effectively, if somewhat coarsely, filling in the 
background of the environment and experience of the 
race ; while Sainte-Beuve interprets the book by sug- 
gesting with delicate but impressive skill the person- 
ality of the writer. 

When a man like Goethe takes up criticism, its 
range and power become at once apparent. Insight 
is substituted for literary tradition, and sympathy is 
emphasised as the keyword of the critical art. We are 



CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER. 1 57 

no longer dealing with a police magistrate intent upon 
the rigid administration of a petty local code, but with 
a man of universal interests, familiar with all standards, 
quick to feel all kinds of excellence, and eager to dis- 
cern in a work of art, not only its relation to the past, 
but its fresh revelation of what is in man and in his life, 
and its new disclosure of the exhaustless power of the 
imagination to create forms. After such a critic has 
spoken, and has suggested the possibilities of criticism, 
it is not surprising to find so many minds of the 
highest order drawn to it. So far from being the 
secondary or derivative art which it is often declared 
to be, criticism, on its higher plane, involves the 
possession of an insight, a breadth of intelligence, and 
a faculty of expression which in their combination 
must be regarded as belonging to the sphere of 
the creative forces. Coleridge, Carlyle, Sainte-Beuve, 
Amiel, Arnold, Emerson, and Lowell represent criticism 
at its best, and are, therefore, the men by whose work 
it must be judged. 



THE EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF 
CRITICISM. 

The prime characteristic of the work of the great 
critics is interpretation, and its deepest influence is 
educational. It is true that all art is educational, and 
that literature, as Matthew Arnold long ago said in one 
of his suggestive school reports, contains the best 
possible material for education ; but criticism is pe- 
culiarly and definitely educational, because it brings 
into clear light the significance of literature as a 
whole. The immediate and vital relationship between 
art and life, which has given literature an entirely 
new meaning to modern men, was largely discerned 
and disclosed by the great modern critics. To them 
we owe not only clear ideas of the specific work and 
personal quality of each writer, but clear ideas of his 
relation to his time and to his race, — of his signi- 
ficance in the development of literature and in the 
history of the human soul. There is a distinct and 
definite educational value in the comprehension of 
Montaigne's relation to his age, of the influences which 
found their expression in Voltaire and Rousseau, and 
of the facts of race inheritance and social condition 
which made so deep an impress on the artistic temper- 
ament of Tourguenieff. There is indeed no educational 



EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF CRITICISM. 159 

material of such interest and importance as that pre- 
served in books, because nowhere else has the life of 
men made a record at once so frank, so searching, 
and so appealing. It was a profound thought of 
Froebel's that the true teacher of each individual is 
the race, and that what the race has thought, felt, and 
accomplished is the richest material for educational 
uses. And literature, being the fullest and frankest 
revelation of what is in men and of what they have 
experienced, is the most vital and persuasive teacher 
of humanity. 

It is and has been the function of criticism in the 
hands of the masters of the art to bring into clear light 
this educational significance of literature ; to trace its 
intimate and necessary relations with the time which 
produced it ; to indicate the racial elements which enter 
into it ; to point out the impress of personality ; and 
to set each great work in true relation to that disclosure 
of the nature of man of which art has kept so faithful a 
record. In thus dealing with literary works as parts of 
one great expression of the soul, criticism has not lost 
its judicial spirit nor parted with its instinct for per- 
fection of form. It has simply struck a true balance 
between the human and the artistic elements in works 
of literature ; it has shown the rootage of art in life ; it 
has set the man beside his work, and made the work 
the revelation of the man. The value of the general 
service of such a new reading of literature cannot be 
estimated, — so wide, so deep, and so subtle are those 
educational influences which play upon the spirits of 



160 MY STUDY FIRE. 

men as part of the atmosphere which they breathe. 
This is, however, a service to literature itself which is 
often overlooked. The quality of disinterestedness, 
upon which Mr. Arnold insisted at the very beginning 
of his career as a critic, carries with it an inevitable 
enlargement of thought. It is impossible to study 
literary works as they appear fresh from widely differ- 
ing conditions of race and individual life without 
receiving, consciously or unconsciously, an education 
of a very high order. Insular ignorance, class pre- 
judice, national antagonism, race hostility, individual 
prepossession and limitation are insensibly modified by 
contact with life, unifying such a variety of conditions, 
and revealing itself with equal authority through such 
different forms of expression. The men are few whose 
literary creeds can remain provincial in the face of the 
catholicity of modern criticism. One may be wedded 
to Romanticism, but he must be uncommonly unre- 
sponsive if he fails to feel the power of such verse as 
Landor and Arnold have given us. In these days it 
is possible to be a lover of Flaubert and De Mau- 
passant and yet enjoy George Sand; to care for 
Corneille and yet recognise the power of Ibsen. 

To put aside accidental methods, accepted stand- 
ards, and personal prepossessions, and with open 
mind to search each work of literature for its aim, its 
reality, and its excellence, is not only to receive that 
kind of education which affects the quality of a man's 
nature, but to make it easier for the writer with the 
new word and the new spirit to secure a hearing. Many 



EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF CRITICISM. l6l 

changes have taken place since Rabelais found it neces- 
sary to veil his attack on the educational methods of 
the Church ; a man may now speak his thought without 
peril to his head. But freedom of opinion was more 
easily won than freedom of artistic expression. Even 
in our own time there has been more than one demon- 
stration of the danger which the artist faces when he 
ventures into a fresh field and employs a new method. 
Carlyle, Browning, Ibsen, and Whitman remind us, in 
different chapters of their experience, that artistic toler- 
ance has not yet come to perfect flower, and that 
disinterestedness is not yet universal. Nevertheless, it 
remains true that the conception of literature was 
never so broad as at this moment, and there have 
never been so many intelligent persons eager to recog- 
nise beauty, truth, and power, however strangely garbed. 
When a critic so fastidious as Matthew Arnold recog- 
nises the literary quality shared in common by men as 
diverse in temperament, idea, aim, and artistic method 
as Wordsworth, Byron, Gray, Shelley, Heine, and 
Tolstoi, the genuine catholicity of modern criticism 
may be regarded as nearly complete. If the new 
method must still win its way against prejudice and 
conventional notions of art, it is rather because of in- 
difference and inertia than of intentional antagonism. 
In these days genius is in greater peril from premature 
than from postponed recognition ; it is more likely to 
be forced than to be repressed. 

The larger thought of literature, as an expression of 
the soul under the conditions of life and in the forms 



1 62 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of art, not only gives it a foremost place among the 
forces which civilise men, but gives it the stimulus of 
a great function and the freedom of a governing power. 
Criticism has not only opened the minds of readers, 
but it has invited writers to a freedom which they 
formerly were compelled to fight for ; and who can 
doubt that in the long run this broader education of 
those to whom literature makes its appeal will react upon 
literary artists through provocation of earlier recog- 
nition, quicker response, and truer comprehension? 



PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 

When Dr. Jowett's translation of Plato's " Dialogues " 
appeared in this country twenty years ago, a story was 
current that a Western newspaper closed its review of 
the work with the remark that Plato was one of the 
greatest of English prose writers ! No finer tribute 
was ever paid to a translator, and that Plato got the 
credit of Dr. Jowett's beautiful skill was the most un- 
affected of compliments to the art of the accomplished 
Master of Balliol College. Plato had long been studied 
as a thinker, but the " Dialogues " as literature had re- 
ceived small attention. An occasional scholar had 
paused by the way in his philosophical studies to note 
the range and beauty of Plato's style, and to feel the 
charm of a literary quality rare at all times, and in no 
other instance possessed in equal degree by a thinker of 
the first order. For while there have been philosophi- 
cal writers of force and clearness, Plato is the only 
great literary artist who has drawn upon all the re- 
sources of language to give philosophic thought vivid- 
ness, adequacy, and perfection of expression. 

The Greek genius gave many illustrations of the 
power of art to receive and communicate the most 
virile and powerful as well as the most subtle and 



1 64 MY STUDY FIRE. 

delicate impress of the soul of man on his fellows 
and his time, but in nothing was the depth and 
force of the artistic impulse more impressively shown 
than in the ease of manner, the amplitude of mood, 
the ripeness of spirit, and perfection of form with 
which a system of thought was set forth. Under 
the spell of an artistic impulse so pervasive and so 
genuine, statesmanship became a matter of harmony 
and co-ordination quite as distinctly as sculpture or 
architecture, — for Pericles was as great an artist as 
Phidias ; oratory touched the sources of power in 
speech with an instinct as sure and true as that of the 
poet, — for Demosthenes was as genuine an artist as 
Sophocles. It was reserved for Plato, however, to 
discuss the profoundest questions of life, not with the 
aridity of a purely logical method, but with the fresh- 
ness, the charm, and the grace of one to whom the 
divine Maker never ceased to be the divine Artist. 
The structure of the Parthenon discloses complete 
mastery of the art of building, but in the thought of its 
builders the pure construction of that noble treasure- 
house was never separated from the obvious and 
matchless beauty which makes it a thing of joy even 
in its ruins. In like manner, the most poetic of Greek 
thinkers did not divorce, even in thought, the massive 
structure of the universe from that beauty which clothes 
it in the sense in which beauty clothes the flower, by 
growing out of its hidden substance. 

It is fortunate for the English-speaking peoples that 
this artist in thought and speech found a translator 



PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 1 65 

whose scholarship was equal to the large demands of 
the " Dialogues," and whose literary instinct and faculty 
were at once so responsive and so adequate. Plato 
could not have been translated save by a man of rare 
literary gift, and the possession of such a gift was the 
foremost qualification of Dr. Jowett. It is the fashion 
among some academicians to sneer at the literary 
faculty, but the fashion is a harmless one ; or, if it 
harms any one, harms only its votaries. The artistic 
element is the creative element, and is, therefore, dis- 
tinctly the most precious quality of the human mind, 
— the quality which manifests itself in clear supremacy 
whenever character, thought, action, or achievement of 
any kind approaches perfection. Scholarship is com- 
paratively common in the dullest age, but the artistic 
gift is rare in the greatest age. In Plato this element 
is so pervasive and so characteristic that to translate 
the " Dialogues " without reproducing their atmosphere 
would be like giving us the measurements of the Sistine 
Madonna without giving us contour, colour, or expres- 
sion. The criticism which has sometimes assailed Dr. 
Jowett's translation because of its grace and fluency 
has been an unintentional tribute to the excellence of 
a work which, with refreshing disregard of academic 
notions, is not only accurate, but has dared to be as 
charming as its original ! 

In Dr. Jowett's full and ripe English, Plato's thought 
and expression are so faithfully preserved that one 
stands in no need of the Introductions to discern the 
quality which makes the " Dialogues " literature quite 



1 66 MY STUDY FIRE. 

as distinctly as they are philosophy. For the abiding 
and varied charm of these discussions is the person- 
ality which pervades them. Plato was not a profes- 
sional thinker, intent upon uncovering the logical order 
of material and spiritual construction ; he was a richly 
endowed personality, to whose mobile imagination and 
quick artistic perceptions the movement of the world 
was full of vitality, colour, and harmony. Thought was 
never divorced from feeling, abstracted from the whole 
of things ; it was involved in the general order and 
inseparable from it. To comprehend the universe, one 
must not only perceive its structure, but feel its fath- 
omless beauty and bathe in its flowing tides of vitality. 
This steadfast determination to see things in their vi- 
tal movement gives us that harmony which is so pro- 
nounced in Plato's thought, and gives us also those 
charming groups which are associated with the " Dia- 
logues." It was a consummate art which made each 
discussion a chapter out of contemporary life, hinting 
at the limitations of thought by skilfully bringing out 
the limitations of the individual mind and experience, 
and keeping always in view the dependence of thought 
on temperament, education, and character; to say 
nothing of the luminous side-lights thrown on the pro- 
foundest themes by interlocutors who contribute not 
only their thoughts, but themselves, to the debate, and 
who give the hour and the question a rich and lasting 
human interest. It is the constant spell of this human 
interest which makes some of the dialogues — the 
" Phsedo," the " Phaedrus," and the "Symposium," for 



PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 167 

instance — literary classics. For the essence of art is 
that it is concrete instead of being abstract, and that it 
realises its thought in symbols and persons instead of 
putting it into propositions or maxims. If Plato had 
been simply a philosopher, he would have given the 
world the dissertation with which it has been familiar 
from the time of Aristotle to that of Kant ; but because 
he was also an artist he immersed his thought in the 
warm atmosphere of human life, and at every stage 
gave it the dramatic interest of intimate human 
association. 

Those changing groups whose talk we seem to over- 
hear in so many pages of the " Dialogues " bring 
before us the mobility of the Ionic spirit, — that sensi- 
tiveness to form and colour, that quick interest in every- 
thing which touched the life of men, that instinct for 
the harmonious, which, in their combination, explain 
not only the Attic genius but the charm of Plato as a 
writer. There is an intense vitality in him, as there 
was in the Greek culture ; but it is restrained and 
harmonised. There is everywhere a strong sense of 
reality ; but it is reality in its very highest and most 
lasting forms. We are introduced to many persons, 
but most of them are of surpassing interest. The 
human element, in delicately drawn contrasts of char- 
acter, constantly divides attention with the thought, 
and while we climb the loftiest heights we are con- 
scious at every step of human companionship. The 
freshness, buoyancy, and vivacity of youth relieve the 
tension of speculation, and sometimes, as in the famous 



1 68 MY STUDY FIRE. 

passage in the " Symposium," the strain of pure thought 
becomes a kind of introduction to a bit of drama of 
surpassing charm. Plato's imagination is revealed in 
the structure of the " Dialogues," and in his conception 
of the form in which his thought is cast ; it finds, how- 
ever, specific disclosure in those fables which often 
contain the profoundest essence of his thought, but 
which are singularly beautiful in imagery and symbol- 
ism. It is found also in his style, in its variety, flex- 
ibility, fluidity, colour, and freshness, — a style delicate 
enough to receive the lightest impression, and stable 
enough to contain and communicate the profound- 
est thought. Says Mr. Pater : " No one, perhaps, 
has with equal power literally sounded the unseen 
depths of thought, and, with what may be truly called 
' substantial ' word and phrase, given locality there to 
the mere adumbration, the dim hints and surmises, of 
the speculative mind." 

Whoever opens the " Dialogues " knows that here 
there is the magic of art in lasting alliance with high 
and exacting thought, and that between these pages 
there is found not only the mind but the immortal life 
and freshness of Greece : " We shall meet a number of 
our youth there : we shall have a dialogue : there will 
be a torchlight procession in honour of the goddess, an 
equestrian procession, — a novel feature ! What? 
torches in their hands, passed on as they race ? Ay, 
and an illumination through the entire night. It will 
be worth seeing ! " 



THE POWER OF THE NOVEL. 

The interest excited by books of such substance and 
quality as Mrs. Ward's " Marcella " shows very clearly 
that the attractive power of fiction, after all these years 
of immense productivity in that department, is still un- 
spent. Mr. Crawford, who is one of the most widely 
read novelists of the day, is of the opinion that the 
novel has passed its prime j but neither the quality of 
work in fiction nor the popular interest in it shows as 
yet any evidence of decrepitude. On the contrary, at 
the close of a century which has been dominated by 
the novel as a literary form, fiction still remains, on the 
whole, the most real and vital of all the forms of ex- 
pression which literary men are using, and is probably 
the form which exerts the widest influence upon the 
reading public. It would be unwise to predict the 
form of literature for which the men and women of 
the close of the twentieth century will care most, but 
the prediction that a hundred years from now the novel 
will still be universally read would be perhaps less rash 
than most literary predictions. In this country it can- 
not be said that we have produced any novelist of the 
first rank since Hawthorne, but we have produced a 
goodly number of novelists of high rank and a multi- 



lyo MY STUDY FIRE. 

tude of short-story writers whose work betrays the pres- 
ence of both nature and art in very uncommon and 
delightful combination. The fact that we have pro- 
duced no great novelist, and that the novel is still so 
widely read, shows that its spell resides in some ele- 
ment aside from the individual power of the writer, and 
that there is in the novel, as a form of literature, a 
charm which the men and women of these days feel 
very deeply. 

That charm resides in the force, the directness, and 
the delicacy with which fiction has interpreted and por- 
trayed human life. The human drama in these later 
days is engrossing to all serious-minded people, and 
wherever the moral or spiritual fact or experience is 
dramatized by the novelist with even a fair degree of 
power, the novel which results is certain to have a 
wide reading. The world-wide movement which has 
already made such modifications in the social condi- 
tions, and which is silently effecting such a revolution 
in the relations of men with men and of class with class, 
finds its way into art through the insight, the observa- 
tion, and the skill of the great novelist ; and such a 
book as " Marcella," entirely aside from its dramatic 
effectiveness, gains an immense power simply from the 
fact that it deals with questions in which everybody is 
interested, and introduces with great directness that 
human element which is to-day part and parcel of 
every religious, political, or industrial problem. The 
same impulse which gives the novel such a hold upon 
readers produces also the great novelist ; for behind 



THE POWER OF THE NOVEL. \>J\ 

every widespread literary movement there is always a 
vital movement of experience ; and the great writer, 
while his power resides in his own personality, is, in a 
deep and true sense, the child of his time and the 
interpreter of its thought. 

This deeper source of interest must not tempt us to 
forget, however, that the art of literature still involves 
both pleasure and recreation, and that the sole end of 
the book is not to instruct, inspire, and expand. These 
are, indeed, the inevitable results of the greatest works 
of art, but there is still a legitimate field for the solace, 
the entertainment, and the recreation of mankind in 
the hands of the story-tellers. It is safe to say, in the 
face of all the tendency novels and the novels of pur- 
pose which have flooded the world in recent years — 
and some of them are notable and permanent contri- 
butions to literature — that men and women still crave 
the novel of adventure and the romantic story. The 
old story-tellers who recited the " Arabian Nights " 
hundreds of years ago, and are still repeating them in 
the East to-day, meet what is commonly known as 
" a real need," — the need of change, diversion, rest, 
and pleasure. And the great story-tellers, like Walter 
Scott and Dumas, who do not represent a school of 
thought, and do not set about a specific work of reform, 
have their place quite as distinctly as George Eliot or 
Charles Dickens. The story of adventure and the 
romantic novel are dear to the human heart, and are 
certain to reappear at intervals, no matter how marked 
the occasional reaction against them may be, as long 



172 MY STUDY FIRE. 

as books are written. Indeed, there will be a question 
in many minds whether, as literary artists, some of these 
occasionally discredited writers for pleasure and enter- 
tainment are not greater than those who use the novel 
as a means of teaching. That is too large a question 
to discuss at this moment. It is enough to point out 
the fact that Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Crockett, Mr. Weyman, 
and Mr. Doyle are in every sense legitimate novelists. 
Indeed, they may point to the greatest masters of fic- 
tion as the exemplars of the particular art which they 
themselves are illustrating. Certainly the world never 
needed diversion of the right sort more than it needs it 
to-day, and there cannot be too many wholesome 
stories of the kind that lighten the burdens, divert the 
attention, and refresh the souls of men. Art stands in 
relations with life too intimate and vital to escape the 
claims of contemporaneous passions, convictions, and 
movements ; but the deepest notes it has struck have 
issued from that fundamental human nature which lies 
below the mutations of society. " Don Quixote " is a 
book for the world and for all time, not because it 
satirized with such destructive power the extravagant 
and over-wrought romances of chivalry, but because it 
is one of those documents of human character which 
are independent of the social conditions which called 
them forth. 



CONCERNING ORIGINALITY. 

No modern man has said so many masterly things 
about art and the creative side of life as Goethe ; his 
comments and reflections form the finest body of 
maxims, suggestions, and principles extant, for one 
who seeks to know how to live fully and freely in the 
intellect. It is easy to point out his limitations, but it 
is not easy to discover the boundaries of his knowledge 
and activities, or to indicate the limits of his influence. 
He created on a great scale; but, on a still greater 
scale, he rationalized and moralized the education, the 
materials, the methods, and the moods of the creative 
man among his fellows. He was not a Titan, strug- 
gling fiercely with intractable elements ; he was, 
rather, an Olympian, easily and calmly doing his work 
and living his life, with a masterful obedience to the 
laws of the mind, and a masterful command of his 
time, his talent, and his tools. In all that concerns 
art in its fundamental relations to the life of the artist 
and to society, he is the greatest modern authority. 

Goethe had not only the insight, but the courage 
and the frankness of genius ; for genius, unlike talent, 
has no tricks, dexterities, or secrets of method ; it is 
as mysterious as the sunlight, and as open and acces- 



174 MY STUDY FIRE. 

sible. It is true, he sometimes took a mischievous 
delight in mystifying his critics, but he made no secret 
of his methods. There was no sleight-of-hand about 
his skill, — it was large, free, elemental power. He 
used the common artistic material as freely as Shakes- 
peare, and with as little concealment. He did not 
take pains to be original in the popular sense of the 
word. In a letter to his friend, Professor Norton, 
Mr. Lowell says : " The great merit, it seems to me, 
of the old painters was that they did not try to be 
original. 'To say a thing,' says Goethe, 'that every- 
body else has said before, as quietly as if nobody had 
ever said it, that is originality.' " The great German, 
who was the most profoundly original of modern men, 
has put this idea in several forms, and given it, by 
repetition, an emphasis which indicates the importance 
he attached to it. " There is nothing worth thinking," 
he says, "but it has been thought before; we must 
only try to think it again." In another maxim he 
declares that " the most foolish of all errors is for 
clever young men to believe that they forfeit their 
originality in recognizing a truth which has already 
been recognized by others." 

The greatest minds see most clearly the long process 
of education which lies behind a new thought, and are 
quickest to know, therefore, that in the bringing of 
new truth to light there is always a wide division of 
work and a general sharing of the honor of discovery. 
It is, indeed, only a small mind that can produce 
something new in the sense that the like of it has 



CONCERNING ORIGINALITY. 175 

never been seen before ; for such a bit of newness 
can never be other than a touch of individualism, an 
unexpected turn of expression, a quaint phrase, an 
odd fancy, a fresh bit of observation. A deep thought, 
a wide generalization, are always based on something 
greater than individualism; they involve wide com- 
munion with nature or humanity. The quickly appre- 
ciated writers often have a kind of superficiality, — a 
telling and effective way of putting things. A fresh 
touch makes a familiar commonplace shine, and it 
passes current for the moment as a new coin ; but it 
remains, nevertheless, the old piece whose edges have 
been worn these many years by much handling. 

The fresh touch is something to be grateful for, but 
it does not evidence the possession of that rare and 
noble quality which we call originality. If we go to 
the great writers for illustration of originality, we do 
not find it in eccentricity of thought, in piquancy of 
phrase, in unusual diction, in unexpected effects of 
any kind. The original writers are peculiarly free 
from those taking mannerisms which are so constantly 
mistaken for evidences of originality, and so often 
imitated. These masters of original thought and style 
are singularly simple, open, and natural. Their power 
obviously lies in frank and unaffected expression of 
their own natures. For originality, like happiness, 
comes to those who do not seek it ; to set it before 
one as an aim is to miss it altogether. The man who 
strives to be original is in grave peril of becoming 
sensational, and therefore, from the standpoint of art, 



i;6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

vulgar; or, if he escapes this danger, he is likely to 
become self-conscious and artificial. There is nothing 
more repulsive to genuine spiritual insight than the 
cheap and tawdry declamation which sometimes passes 
in the pulpit for originality, and nothing more repug- 
nant to true artistic feeling than the posing and strain- 
ing which are sometimes accepted for the moment as 
evidences of creative power. Power of the highest 
kind is largely unconscious, and partakes too much of 
the nature of the divine power to be made the servant 
of ignoble and petty ends ; and the artist whose aim is 
simply to catch the eye of the world will not long 
retain the power that is in him. 

Originality of the highest and most enduring type 
has no tricks, mannerisms, or devices ; it is elemental ; 
it is largely unconscious ; it rests, not upon individual 
cleverness, but upon broad and deep relationships 
between the artist and the world which he interprets. 
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are the most original 
men who have appeared in the history of literature ; 
but they are singularly devoid of novelty in the cus- 
tomary sense of the word. They are, on the contrary, 
singularly familiar ; every reader feels that they have 
somehow gotten the advantage of him by expressing 
at an earlier age the thoughts and feelings which he 
had supposed to be peculiarly his own. Nothing really 
great is ever unexpected ; for the really great work is 
always based on something universal, in which every 
man has a share. A conceit, a bit of quaintness, a 
cunning device, a sudden turn of thought or speech, 



CONCERNING ORIGINALITY, 1 77 

takes us unaware and puzzles us ; it is individual, and 
we have no share in it. But a great idea, or a piece 
of great art, finds instant recognition of its veracity 
and reality in the swift response of our souls. It not 
only speaks to us, — it speaks in us and for us. It is 
great because so vast a sweep of life is included in it ; 
it is deep because it strikes below all differences of 
experience into the region of universal experience. 
Homer and Shakespeare are, in a way, as elemental as 
the sky which overarches all men, and which every 
man sees, or may see, every day of his life. But the 
sky is not the less wonderful because it belongs to the 
whole earth, and is as much the possession of the clown 
as of the poet. The power which hangs it before 
every eye has furnished no more compelling evidence 
of its mysterious and incalculable resources. In like 
manner, the highest power illustrated in art demon- 
strates its depth and creative force by the elemental 
simplicity and range of its creations, — by its insight 
into those things which all men possess in common. 
The distinctive characteristic of the man of profound 
originality is not that he speaks his own thought, but 
that he speaks my thought ; not that he surprises me 
with novel ideas and phrases, but that he makes me 
acquainted with myself. 



12 



BY THE WAY. 

How much of what is best and pleasantest in life 
comes to us by the way ! The artist forms great plans 
and sets about great achievements, but when he comes 
to the hour of realization he discovers that the personal 
reward has come mainly by the way. The applause of 
which he dreamed, the fame for which he hoped, bring 
small satisfaction ; the joy of the work was largely in 
the doing of it, and was taken in the long days of toil 
and the brief times of rest which were part of the great 
undertaking. To the man or woman who looks for- 
ward from the heights of youth life seems to be an 
artistic whole, which can be completely shaped by the 
will, and wrought out with perfection of detail in the 
repose and silence of the workshop. In that glowing 
time the career of a great man appears to be so sym- 
metrical, so rounded, so complete, that it seems to be 
a veritable work of art, thought out and executed with- 
out hindrance, and with the co-operation of all the 
great forces. Nights of rest and days of work, unin- 
terrupted and cumulative, with bursts of applause 
widening and deepening as the years go by, with fame 
adding note after note to her hymn of praise, — is not 



BY THE WAY. 179 

this the dream of young ambition as it surveys the field 
from the place of preparation ? 

The ideal is not an ignoble one, but it falls far short 
of the great reality in range and effort. There is an 
artistic harmony in a great life ; but it is not a con- 
scious beauty deliberately evoked by a free hand bent 
only on the illustration of its skill ; it is a beauty born of 
pain, self-sacrifice, and arduous surrender to the stern 
conditions of success. A bit of fancy lightly inspires 
the singer, and as lightly borrows the wings of verse ; 
a great vision of the imagination demands years and 
agonies. A bit of verse, such as serves for the small 
currency of poetry, runs off the pen on a convenient 
scrap of paper ; a great poem involves a deep move- 
ment of human life, — something vast, profound, mys- 
terious. A great life is a work of art of that noble 
order in which a man surrenders himself to the creative 
impulse, and becomes the instrument of a mightier 
thought and passion than he consciously originates. 
There is a deep sense in which we make our careers, 
but there is a deeper sense in which our careers are 
made for us. The greater the man the greater the 
influences that play upon him and centre in him ; it 
is more a question of what he shall receive than of 
what he shall do. His life-work is wrought out in no 
well-appointed atelier, barred against intrusion, enfolded 
in silence ; the task must be accomplished in the great 
arena of the world, jostled by crowds, beaten upon by 
storms, broken in upon by all manner of interruptions. 
The artist does not stand apart from his work, survey- 



180 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ing its progress from hour to hour, and with a skilful 
hand bringing his thought in ever clearer view ; for the 
work is done, not by, but within him ; his aspiring soul, 
passionate heart, and eager mind are the substance 
upon which the tools of the graver work. Death and 
care, disease and poverty, do not wait afar off, awed 
by greatness and enthralled by genius ; the door is 
always open to them, and they are often familiar com- 
panions. The work of a great life is always accom- 
plished with toil, self-sacrifice, and with incessant 
intrusions from without ; it is often accomplished amid 
bitter sorrows and under the pressure of relentless 
misfortune. 

Yet these things, that break in upon the artistic 
mood and play havoc with the artistic poise, make the 
life-work immeasurably nobler and richer ; the reality 
differs from the ideal of youth in being vaster, and 
therefore more difficult and painful of attainment. 
The easy achievement, always well in hand, and exe- 
cuted in the quiet of reposeful hours, gives place to the 
sublime accomplishment wrought out amid the uproar 
of the world and under the pressure of the sorrow and 
anguish which are a part of every human lot. The 
toil is intense, prolonged, and painful because it is to 
be imperishable ; there is a divine element in it, and 
the work takes on a form of immortality. The little 
time which falls to the artist here is inadequate to the 
greatness of his task; the applause, small or great, 
which accompanies his toil is but a momentary and 
imperfect recognition of what has been done with 



BY THE WAY. l8l 

strength and beauty. It is pleasant when men see 
what one has done, but the real satisfaction is the con- 
sciousness that something worthy of being seen has 
been accomplished. The rewards of great living are 
not external things, withheld until the crowning hour 
of success arrives ; they come by the way, — in the 
consciousness of growing power and worth, of duties 
nobly met, and work thoroughly done. To the true 
artist, working always in humility and sincerity, all life 
is a reward, and every day brings a deeper satisfaction. 
Joy and peace are by the way. 



THE END. 



